Pandora FMS Log Monitoring Solution Gets IBM i Hooks
September 19, 2022 Alex Woodie
Pandora FMS, an open source log monitoring solution that has been in use for decades, is being integrated with IBM i, the software’s commercial backer announced last week. Thanks to a partnership between Pandora FMS and the French company M81, organizations that use the software can add IBM i into the monitoring mix.
Pandora FMS, short for Flexible Monitoring System, is an open source tool for consuming and analyzing server and network logs. The utility, which was written in PHP and runs on Linux, uses agents (developed in Perl) to keep an eye on servers running Linux, Windows, and Unix (Solaris and AIX) operating systems. It also uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to gather log and event data from servers and network devices.
After the data is securely transmitted to the Pandora FMS server via, the logs are stored in a relational database (Oracle, MySQL, and MariaDB are supported) where they can be monitored and queried. Users interact with Pandora FMS through Web-based dashboards, where they can consume the latest alerts or drill into historical data to analyze trends.
The software also supports some root cause analysis functionality, which gives Pandora FMS some application performance management (APM) capability. It can also spot correlations hidden in logs, allowing users to perform more advanced monitoring.
Pandora FMS was originally created in 2004 by Sancho Lerena, the founder and CEO of Ártica. The company sells an enterprise version of Pandora FMS through a company by the same name that has offices in Coral Gables, Florida; Madrid, Spain; and in Mexico.
In an interview with Sector Ejecutivo, Lerena, who is also the CEO of the company Pandora FMS, discussed how he aims to replace legacy monitoring tools from IBM, HPE, CA, and BMC. “We compete with Solarwinds, ManageEngine, ZenOSS, and Splunk,” he said.
Users monitor their IT systems via the Pandora FMS dashboard.
Last week, the Florida office of Pandora FMS announced that the company has inked a deal with the French software vendor M81. The deal enables M81’s IBM i agent, called Control for i, to integrate with Pandora FMS, thereby bringing IBM i servers under Pandora FMS’s monitoring umbrella.
The new IBM i agent that Pandora FMS is offering can monitor more than 150 aspects of the IBM i server across system messages, database messages, backups, batch jobs, high availability replication, EDI jobs, and data transfers, according to the company’s IBM i monitoring Web page.
“Pandora FMS for IBM i is easy to implement for any IBM i technician,” the company says. All that is needed are “familiar IBM i commands,” it continues. “Absolutely no development is needed.”
While the IBM i agent interacts with the Pandora FMS software, the IBM i agent is licensed separate from the Pandora FMS software, and must be purchased separately, the company says.
“This is a turning point for companies that still have systems like IBM i that, despite being legacy, still have great influence in business IT management,” Lerena said in a press release.
Pandora FMS is available via several mechanisms. Users can use the free and open source version of Pandora FMS under the GPL2 license. The company sells subscriptions to a software-as-a-service offering, and users can also buy a traditional license to install their software on prem. Lastly, Pandora FMS can be obtained under an OEM license.
M81 is based in Lyon, France, and has been in business since 2014. The company was founded by CTO Pascal Ruckebusch, who has decades of experience on the platform. In addition to Control for i, M81 develops two other products, including Flash for i, which uses IBM FlashCopy and EMC SnapShot technology to clone an IBM i disk volume in just two minutes, and Recover for i, a continuous backup tool that is based on IBM’s local journaling technology.
