For our November “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Pandora FMS, an enterprise-ready monitoring solution.
Pandora FMS provides unparalleled flexibility for IT to address both immediate and unforeseen operational issues, including infrastructure and IT processes. It consolidates all the needs of modern monitoring (ITOM, APM, BAM) and provides status and performance metrics from different operating systems, virtual infrastructure (VMware, Hyper-V, XEN), Docker containers, applications, storage and hardware devices such as firewalls, proxies, databases, web servers or routers.
Pandora FMS was previously selected “Staff Pick” Project of the Month in June of 2016 where the Pandora team spoke about the project’s developments and direction. Recently we caught up with project founder Sancho Lerena to find out how the project has been doing since then.
SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were chosen Project of the Month in June 2016?
Sancho Lerena (SL): Our features have grown enormously and we also attracted more users to our community. Sourceforge project downloads have increased an average of 75% since June 2016, but the growth of our monitoring blog has probably been the greatest improvement, reaching 2K daily visits.
SF: Have any of your project goals changed since then?
SL: Nope. Our approach is still the same: to give the community the most professional (and open!) system and network monitoring software. That hasn’t change since 2004 😉
SF: What project goals have you achieved so far?
SL: Our goal has always been to grow significantly since 2004, but that depends on being able to meet users’ needs, so in our terms, that implies not only doing the things you’re supposed to do in the best way, but also doing new things as well as adding them to the project, by integrating them into what is already running. That’s why we moved to a new release system at the beginning of 2017, using a rolling release system, which releases updates every 21 days.
During 2017 we have released tons of new features without any major bug or release problem. The ability to quickly release new ideas and fixes is really exciting for us, in the past; releases would take months and were always very stressful (and sometimes buggy!)
SF: What can we look forward to with Pandora?
SL: Plans for Pandora FMS are moving forward to the IoT world, this way; we are able to monitor hundreds of thousand of devices. Huge scalability is now our main goal, but our backlog of pending features has now more than 300 tickets ,so, we’ll be around a while 🙂
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
SL: We have been walking together with Sourceforce since 2004, at that time, Pandora was known as “Pandoramon” in Sourceforge, and after walking together for almost 14 years, we have seen lots of projects that have grown and some others that have disappeared, and also new “shining” sites for building communities but, like Sourceforge, we are here to stay and to be a solid part of opensource system and network administration. The most important aspect of a project is to be backed by a strong team and a diverse community.