Pandora FMS vs. PingPlotter

I believe Pandora FMS is a solution that adapts to any type of scenario; it's useful for small businesses as well as large organizations. It more than meets the need to have a comprehensive monitoring system capable of sending alerts instantly and consulting historical data, logs, and trends. Additionally, for small businesses, the free version will be more than sufficient in most cases. And for those who do not want to deploy the service on-premise, there is an option for MaaS (Monitoring as a Service).

Incentivized

It is well suited for performing monitoring and testing from a single device. It is less appropriate if you have to monitor from multiple different endpoints. That type of deployment would be more of an enterprise application. If you are looking for an end user monitoring solution then PingPlotter is the one for you.

Incentivized

• All-in-one software
• Flexible and easy configuration
• Multi-platform
• Design in PERL, CCS and HTML5

• Monitor traffic in network
• Measure stops when contacting network locations such as websites
• Measures the lag and latency it takes to contact network locations
• Gives you both induvidual measurements as well as good oversight
• identifies when network lag or disconnect occurs

• The interface is not intuitive due to the number of options it has and its organization.
• It has a free version with limitations, and another paid version. The commercial one has a quite high cost.
• It has a certain learning curve.

Incentivized

• Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
• Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
• Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
• more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.

Incentivized

The solution is very complete, and even includes extras such as IPAM.
Deployment can be a bit unintuitive at first, but once you become familiar with the solution and thanks to its automatic deployment options it ends up being easier than it seemed. The power and options of the solution are its greatest virtue.

Incentivized

I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.

Incentivized

The support team answers very quickly. They are always willing to find a solution to any need that is required by us or one of our clients.

I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.

Incentivized

Before using Pandora FMS, tests were carried out with all these tools:

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• IBM Tivoli
• PRTG
• SolarWinds

Pandora FMS allows simple customization by making adjustments to text files, developing agent add-ons without the need to be a programmer, there is no scenario where we could not take data and save it in PandoraFMS, IoT, industrial products, and everything that any client needs to monitor.

A balance of a generic tool vs a network equipment product is necessary when investigating network incidents or disruptions. Need to train the engineer to use both tools to perform their analysis and to dive down to the issues as fast as they can. Experience with the tools will continue to play a part if we were to adopt PingPlotter

Incentivized

• Substantial improvement in monitoring service. Detecting alerts on time always results in economic savings.
• Improvement in the periodic report associated with the capacity plan. The tool is indispensable in decision-making.
• Centralization and tool savings. Pandora FMS's versatility allows centralizing several functions into a single tool.

Incentivized

• Great ROI, troubleshooting time has been reduced by 90%
• Network Discoveries used to take 2 to 3 hours and were inconsistent - now it is a matter of minutes
• lacks integration into our MSP toolkit, and we now use it as a stand alone product

Incentivized