Skip to content

Thanks to you, our LTS Release finally has a name!

A few days ago we gave you the opportunity in social media and through email to choose, by means of a simple survey, the upcoming names of our LTS Release (Long Term Support).

Participation has been a success! More than two hundred participants! Making it clear that you love both our releases and Star Trek of course.

* Let’s not forget that our repertoire of possible names, from which we gave you a choice and vote, was an extensive list of Star Trek spaceships.

Well…

We finally have a winning name for our LTS Release!

Are you ready?

And the winner is… AKIRA.

Our new LTS Release (Long Term Support) will be called Pandora FMS NG LTS Akira.

We already know that with “Akira” you can think of the famous and award-winning manga by Katsuhiro Otomo or his animated film with the same name. At Pandora FMS we love him too!

*Hence our little homage in the above illustration. Give it up for Tetsuo!

But it actually refers to the spaceship Class Akira. A Starfleet heavy cruiser in Star Trek that was specially designed for combat.

3,055,000 tons and a cruising speed of Warp 9.2

As much a boss and as much a geek as we are.

El-autentico-Pandora-FMS-NG-LTS-Akira

And that’s not all!

Our next LTS Releases will be named after the most voted ships that have followed Akira.

  • Hope
  • Renaissance
  • Andromeda
  • Defiant
  • Excelsior
  • Tachyon
  • Stellaris
  • Antares
  • Apollo
  • Chimera

It only remains to say that THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your participation and long life and prosperity to all of you!

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

The all-seeing eye can’t wear a patch

The expert technologists around you, that digital magazine, your mother and your horoscope have already warned you more than once: 

IT monitoring is a prerequisite for your company’s health!

Visibility. Not a blind spot in your monitoring

But, of course, as much as you strive to be inclusive when it comes to keeping a close eye on the parts that make up your network, some systems end up escaping your attention.

The so-called blind spots

But instead of accepting this as an inevitable heavy cross (which, in addition, entails a great cost for your business), consider getting down to work and:

At the very least, avoid what you don’t see from damaging your IT infrastructure and the business processes that depend on it.

Remove the patch! Trace and perfect high visibility

Of course, you might be wondering:

What should a monitoring strategy include?

It is a very frequent question, which requires some zeal and work.

The determination of your monitoring strategy, in favor of greater IT visibility, must begin with creating an outline or index with the relevant information of the systems from all your platforms.

This will make it easier for the individual aspects of each system to be delivered and broken down. You will have before you the parts that interest you, the most appropriate ones, for a deeper evaluation level.

Take this outline, collaborate with the cool IT team of your organization, now actually help to define and implement monitoring with full visibility of all your IT assets.

You can take it as a high school group project!

These renewed aspects to be monitored will include:

  • Observation of specialized hardware devices.
  • The cloud-based networks you are using.
  • Traffic paths across all systems, including hybrid cloud configurations.
  • That long et cetera that remains to be defined.

And yet, there will still be that possibility that some systems will remain hidden. 

It will then be necessary to resort to the use of more comprehensive monitoring tools to help their discovery.

Is perfect monitoring possible?

I’m afraid perfect monitoring coverage is just an illusion.

Even if you have all the award-winning or top-notch monitoring tools at your disposal, it will never be enough to guarantee a coverage of perfect monitoring.

We tell you from experience:

Many monitoring tools create the false illusion of seeing absolutely everything within your infrastructure. 

It is so that you have a certain sense of security.

Sometimes it is noticeable when some data packets, which contain sensitive information, disappear from view for a while, appearing, as if by magic, within another system from your network.

Here’s solid proof of a blind spot in your monitoring.

And this test only sheds light on the current capacity of monitoring tools.

So it may sound tempting to get hold of all the monitoring tools on the market so you don’t miss anything, but, come on, this will only lead to a system hypertrophy that will provide you with a false sense of security.

Now what? Is there a technological miracle that escapes us? A definitive monitoring tool that works over good and evil and provides true security and visibility at the height of Sauron’s own igneous eye?

Go further: Machine learning

Clarity is the essence of a successful IT department

That’s right, security protocols and configurations must be very clear, such as for example, the knowledge of which servers host each application.

It is also more than advisable to find out the status of all the organization’s assets.

Clarity is the root with which to reach, by pulling, the hows and whys of the system’s blind spots.

To achieve this clarity/enlightening you must, of course, have the right tools. Tools with which to perform advanced analysis, with which to cross the different levels and layers of your network.

Your monitoring tool should, at the most fundamental level, bring together the complex layers of monitoring data from the multiple platforms you monitor, as well as employ intuitive levels of machine learning to help uncover hidden computing assets.

If you use monitoring tools based on machine learning you reduce the time you spend on executing the root cause analyses, while obtaining a full picture of the IT assets.

Machine learning will also help you eliminate monitoring silos, which, as many of you know, tend to become an burdensome manual task that takes too much time from our precious IT administrators.

Pure and high visibility on a single screen

I’ve scared you very much. But actually, identifying the isolated pieces of technology in your stack and centralizing them for effective monitoring and management is an achievable goal.

Monitoring configurations in a single screen give you an advantage.

Mainly thanks to their capacity to represent data from multiple infrastructure sources and to display them in a single view.

These configurations provide a unique vision of the internal operation of a network and help to identify the misled IT assets that must return to the fold.

With this type of solution, you obtain peace of mind and the capacity to operate effectively in the most complex and accelerated IT environments, while you automate the most concise tasks, for true full monitoring.

Conclusions

Obtaining full visibility of your environment by means of monitoring seems like an impossible task, buuut things can be different!

If you try it at least, you will see in a moment how you obtain higher security levels and higher response capacity in the face of incidents.

But you know, before running the 100 meters you have to learn to walk.

And to end the visibility gap you must do some soul-searching of your systems, identify each point to be monitored, and release the silos, so that comprehensive management and monitoring of your systems is possible.

From here, where else, we advise that if you are truly looking for a solution to get rid of blind spots from your monitoring, take a look at what Pandora FMS can offer you!

Resources

Pandora FMS plugin library

Pandora FMS official forum

I want to learn more!

Nuestro Trial

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

What is WMIC and why will it be discontinued?

As we already explained on one occasion in this blog, Windows Management Instrumentation, WMI, is a technology owned by the company Microsoft®.

But there’s even more!

Things have changed and we are going to tell you all about it!

Do you already know what WMI is and why it will be discontinued?

WMIC was the WMI command-line utility, which provided an interface for the  Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) Remote Protocol.

This protocol, in turn, allows remote procedure calls (RPC) with a set of extensions overlaid on Microsoft Remote Procedure Call Extensions.

DCOM is used for communication between software components such as Pandora FMS and networked devices.

The benefits of monitoring are unavoidable and this type of technology (communication and connection protocols) are used to work, prevent problems and progress.

However, it all depends on the use it is given:

In January 2021, the MITRE corporation registered the CVE-2021-26414 vulnerability, which recognizes that there was a possibility to access the privileges of a normal user, a non-MS Windows® system administrator user.

*Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures is a list of registered U.S. government information about known security vulnerabilities, in which each reference has a CVE-ID identification number.

The exploitation of this weakness  is not given by fortuitous conditions.

Never, right at first, an attacker who manages to gain access, stays only as a normal user, no, they usually become system administrators.

Thus, time and commitment are required to study the victim and achieve the task.

The company Microsoft®, concerned about the peace of mind of their customers, decided to publish and distribute the security patch called KB5004442 (February 2022), which increases user authentication.

Therefore, WMIC is not able to connect despite being a product from that same software brand.

However, that’s actually a side effect, not the main reason why the WMIC software was discontinued.

For some time now, Microsoft, progressively, has been updating, deleting and improving each of its components, and has even created new utilities.

This is the case of PowerShell, which will bear the new responsibilities inherited from WMIC from now on.

At Pandora FMS, always respecting our security architecture, we presented PandoraWMIC. Improved software for the new WMI connection requirements, which avoids this type of inconvenience, both in the Open version and in the Enterprise version.

Absolutely no one is safe from security attacks. This is only a small edge from the whole picture.

You may check our official documentation on this topic:

https://pandorafms.com/manual/en/documentation/07_technical_annexes/15_security_architecture

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

What’s New Pandora FMS 761

Let’s check out together the features and improvements related to the new Pandora FMS release: Pandora FMS 761.

What’s new in the latest Pandora FMS release, Pandora FMS 761

NEW FEATURES AND IMPROVEMENTS

New “Custom Render” Report

A new item has been included in Pandora FMS reports, Custom Render. With this report you can manage in a more customized way with SQL queries, module graphs and HTML output customization. It allows users to create fully customized reports visually, including graphs.

 

New TOP-N connections report

A new item has been included in Pandora FMS reports, TOP-N connections. With this report you will have a summary table with the total data from connections and with connections of the interval by port pairs.

New Agent/Module Report 

A new item has been included in Pandora FMS reports, Agents/modules status. With this report you will be able to have in a table the state of agents/modules with the last data and the timestamp of this last-received data.

New Agent/Module status Report

It allows users to show a list of agents/modules along with their state, filtering previously by group. 

New SLA services Report

A new item has been included in Pandora FMS reports, SLA services. With this report you will be able to see the SLA of the services that you wish to configure, combining data from different nodes in a single report.

New alert templates

If you want to use the new group, you have it available in our module library:

New Heatmap view

A new view has been added, that of Heatmap. In this view you can see all Pandora FMS information organized by groups and module or agent groups. It is a view that is permanently refreshed and that allows you to see at a glance all the monitored information.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

Pandora FMS at the very top of G2

Bring it on Pandora FMS! If we have previously told you about our success at the Open Source Awards 2022 and the Peer Awards 2021, today we are here to tell you that we are at it once again!

We are at the top of G2 of Monitoring Software!

“Why is it easier to get unbiased information about a hotel room than about software?”

In 2012, five entrepreneurs asked themselves this question. The next day, they founded G2.

Una plataforma que en la actualidadA platform that currently has more than 60 million visits per year, and on which users can read and write quality reviews on 100,000 software products and other professional services.

More than 1,500,000 reviews have already been published, which help companies around the world make better decisions about how to reach their full potential.

That is why it is so important and honorable that Pandora FMS has become part of its Top 10 of the best Network Monitoring software.

  1. Ninja One
  2. Atera
  3. Logic Monitor
  4. Auvic
  5. Solar Winds
  6. Domotz
  7. Progress WhatsUp Gold
  8. Pandora FMS

Above many other already recognized companies. Such as Microsoft, Datadog, Zabbix, Nagios, Dynatrace, Catchpoint, Entuity, PRTG, Checkmk, Wireshark, Smokeping, OPManager, Netreo, Munin, Cacti and many more.

A badge that appoints Pandora FMS once again as the total monitoring solution:

  • Cost-effective, scalable and able to cover most infrastructure deployment options.
  • Find and solve problems quickly, whether you come from on-premise, multi cloud or a mix of both of them.
  • In hybrid environments where technologies, management processes and data are intertwined, a flexible tool capable of reaching everywhere and unifying data display is needed to make its management easier.

That’s Pandora FMS

You knew it, and now all G2 users know it too!

How did we get into the Top 10 of the G2 platform?

For now, to be included in the category of Network Monitoring, a product must, among other things:

  • Constantly monitor the performance of an entire computer network.
  • Create a baseline for network performance metrics.
  • Alert administrators if the network crashes, or varies, from the baseline.
  • Suggest solutions to performance issues when they arise.
  • Provide network performance data display.

Then comes the usability score of a product, which is calculated using their own algorithm that takes into account the satisfaction ratings of real users.

This rating is also often used by buyers to quickly compare and identify on the page the top-rated products.

The number of reviews received at G2 is also important, buyers rely more on products with more reviews.

Higher number of reviews = Higher representativeness and accuracy of the customer experience

In turn, G2, apart from rating the products based on the reviews collected in its user community, also does so with the aggregated data from online sources and social networks.

And then, participate in the different categories where you can earn badges like the ones we have won:

  • Best Usability. 
  • Easiest to Use.
  • Easiest Admin.
  • Best Meets Requirements.

And as they say over there:

That would be it!

Today we have reached this milestone, and since 2020 we have been winning these categories, all seasons! Let the Himalaya tremble in fear, we continue climbing to the very top!

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

×

Hello!

Click one of our contacts below to chat on WhatsApp

×