You could pay thousands of dollars for a comprehensive enterprise network monitoring application – but you don’t have to. With Pandora FMS (Flexible Monitoring System) you get functionality comparable to that of proprietary applications like Hewlett-Packard’s Network Node Manager, Hyperic HQ, and OpManager, and better-known open source offerings like Zenoss, Zabbix, Nagios, and OpenNMS.

Pandora FMS monitors both systems and applications. It comes with agents for all active Windows platforms (2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7), Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, *BSD, Mac OS, and even Nokia/IPSO. It can collect information several ways (SNMP, TCP, ICMP, WMI, HTTP, SNMP traps) and display it in a powerful web- and AJAX-based centralized management console. (You can read more about Pandora’s features and see an online demo on the project’s web site.)

You might not have heard much about Pandora FMS because the project puts all its resources into development, not publicity. Nevertheless, Pandora FMS is in use in the datacenters of several organizations and corporations, including Brussels University and Cordoba University, as well as huge multinationals in the telecommunications sector and IT companies. Project leader Sancho Lerena says the project will publish the names of more enterprises that are using Pandora FMS on the project’s new web site when it launches version 3.0, for which release candidate code came out last week.

Lerena says he started working on Pandora FMS in 2004, when he needed a flexible, non-intrusive monitoring system that was able to integrate with other apps. “To build Pandora we used PHP and Perl because they offer a lot of libraries which allow us to focus directly on our goals, and avoid construction of additional tools or libraries. We also use AJAX and web technology to make the console user-friendly and powerful. Because PHP and Perl are easy to work with we can improve our code and add new features without a formal heavyweight process of design. Each developer uses his own development tools; there is no official tool we use. Some of us like Eclipse; I myself use gedit to work on code.”

The project posted Pandora’s code on SourceForge.net in 2006 because “SourceForge.net is the most important reference for the OSS community in the world, so we need to be there.”

Lerena says the core team of six developers is working on GIS, better reporting, and a new information architecture engine for advanced data post processing for future releases. “Our version cycle is about nine months. We always need help, mostly on testing, documentation, and translation. The best way to get in touch with us is the developer list.” You can also check out the project’s developer blog and web forums.