Pandora FMS is a monitoring tool that allows a system administrator to visually analise the status and efficiency of Operating Systems, Servers, Applications and Hardware Systems - such as firewalls, proxies, databases, Web servers, tunnelling servers, routers, switches, processes, services, remote access servers and so on. All integrated into an open and distributed architecture. Pandora can be implemented over any operating system, with specific agents for each platform. Pandora can also monitor any TCP/IP hardware system, as load balancers, routers, switches, printers and so on. Pandora architecture is formed of four main components: - Web Console: Pandora's user interface. The user controls and operates the system with it. Several Web consoles can be implemented in a single system. The Web console is written in PHP, and it must be over a database and a Web server. It is compatible with any platforms - GNU/Linux, Solaris, Win2000, AIX, etc. Although, the official supported platform is GNU/Linux. The console permits the user to control the status of the agents, view statistical information, generate graphs and data tables, keep a system incident control, moreover, it will be able to generate reports and change the alerts, agents, and user profile settings. - Core Server: Pandora Core server is the receptor of the data packages and generates the alerts - it is the brain of the system. Several servers can work alongside for larger systems. It has been developed in Perl and works over any platform, although, the official platform is GNU/Linux. The core server accesses Pandora database, which is shared with the Web server, and stores the processed data packages. The server is executed under the name of "Demon", and processes the packages stored in its file system. The data is generated by the system agents. Despite the server's low system resources comsumption and simple installation and operation, the core server is the most critical element of the system. The core server receives and processes the produced data, and fires the alerts and the events. - Central Database: At the moment the system only supports MySQL. The central database keeps all the information Pandora needs to work - agent data, settings, user information, incidents, system settings, etc. The system can use a MySQL cluster to store the information, or a High Availability (HA) solution for larger sytems. This database can work with any of the platform officially supported by MySQL. Pandora can be implemented with MySQL versions 3.0 and 4.0, although the latest is recommended. - Pandora Agents: They collect all the system's data. They are executed in each local system, although they can also collect remote information by intalling monitoring sytems for the agent in several different machines - called satellite agents. They have been developed to work under a specific platform, making use of the specific tools of the used language: VBSCript/Windows Scripting for Microsoft platforms (Win2000, WinXP and Win2003) and ShellScripting for Unix - which includes GNU/Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and BSD, as well as the Nokia's IPSO. Pandora agents can be developed in virtually any language, given its simple API and being open source. The web console is the tool used to administrate Pandora. It is written in PHP and doesn't need any third party software to work, neither FLASH, JAVA, nor ActiveX plug-ins. The Web console can be run over any web browser supporting HTML and CSS (IE5+ or Mozilla 4+). Pandora administration is divided in the following main elements: Pandora users Agents Alerts Incidents Server configuration Database maintenance