Pandora: The Free Distributed Monitoring System
===============================================

Version 1.2

What is Pandora DMS
-------------------

Pandora are a Free Software set of programs that allows to analyze in a visual way status and performance of several parameters from different Operating Systems, servers, applications and hardware systems as Firewalls, Proxies, Data Bases, Web Servers or Routers. All integrated into an open and distributed architecture.

Pandora can be deployed in every Operating System. You have an agent for every platform. Pandora can monitor hardware systems with TCP/IP Stack, as load balancers, routers, switches, printers and so on.

Pandora has six components: Pandora Data Server, Pandora Network Server, Pandora SNMP Console, Pandora Agents, Pandora Database and Pandora Web Management System (Web Console).

Pandora Servers and SNMP Console

They are the recipient of bundles of information and the generators of alerts; they are the brain of the system. We can have several servers for very big systems or a single server. They are developed in Perl and works under any platform, with the required modules. Nevertheless its "official" platform is GNU/Linux. They also insert the gathered data into the Database. You can have several Pandora Servers connected with the same Database.

Pandora Web Console

It allows to manage the system and to operate with it; it's the user interface of Pandora. We can have several Web Consoles in the same implantation. It is developed in PHP and leans on a Data Base and a Web Server, being able to work in any platform: GNU/Linux, Solaris, Win2000, AIX and others.

Pandora Database

Core module of Pandora (as you can see in the architecture overview). In this database resides all the information of the enterprise, for example, all data gathered by agents, all configuration defined by administrator, all events, incidents, audit info... At this moment, only MySQL DataBase is supported. More Databases in the future.

Pandora Agents

They can monitor any numeric parameter, boolean states, strings or numerical incremental data and/or condition. They have a centralized architecture based on lightweight design for agents (shellscript, wsh, perl) and light agents to collect data. They support all type of platforms (Microsoft, AIX, Solaris, GNU/Linux, IPSO, FreeBSD, etc) because the agents are completely free software, and they communicate using SSH, FTP, NFS or other good way, using an XML container to transport data. 

What do I need?
---------------
Perl, Perl Modules, MySQL, PHP, PHP Modules. See the Installation Documentation or go to http://pandora.sourceforge.net

License
-------

The project is distributed under the GPL License v2 or later.

Copyright (C) 2004-2006 Sancho Lerena.

