About a year ago, in another Pandora FMS blog, we talked about what Grafana is, we explained what it was and how it was related to other software. Now we go a little further and we want to show you how to create Grafana dashboards with the data provided by Pandora FMS. It is undeniable that this tool enjoys the support of a large user community, due to the versatility it offers to use different data sources to have displayed on its boards.

You may already know it if you follow us on a regular basis: in Pandora FMS blog we love to look ahead to the future. And we have to tell you a secret: next to our coat rack, locked up in a dresser, we have a gleaming crystal ball that we check from time to time. To activate it, you just have to pronounce the word “monitoring” in a secret language that I will not reveal here, and that is when it lights up and shows us its knowledge.

If you do not have much idea about how to share technology, you may go crazy when shopping or going through online gift websites. You know that the person you have to give something to for secret santa is a technology nerd, but you don’t know much more, and you are afraid of disappointing your friend or, directly, looking stupid with some gift that you thought was perfect, but your friend finds it the most old-fashioned and obsolete thing that exists in the technology market.

Just when we thought we had got rid of Y2K, we came across an unexpected effect. The 2020 effect. Buried deep in the system, a basic Perl library has made any date comparison operation with the year 1970 become 2070, starting from January 1, 2020. It may seem not important at all, but for many systems, the “beginning” of the Unix calendar begins precisely in 1970, that is, a base reference date, used in much code precisely since the origin of Unix times, 1970.

In release 742, we have updated some components integrated into the solution, such as cURL 7.65.3 version, in addition to several bugs being solved to help improve software performance, such as an error in SLA-Wizard reports or on private dashboards. We also have updates, such as new integrations in the Pandora FMS plug-in library: RabbitMQ and Grafana.

If you are a developer, a systems administrator, you work in the information technology sector or you are simply a technology enthusiast who has ever deployed some type of application, surely you will have faced the same problem we all ran into. If you are thinking of dependencies, bingo!

But does this mean that Pandora FMS is also into Lynis security? Well, its specialty is different… but yes, of course, it reaches everything covered by monitoring. In fact, flexibility is inherent to its name: FMS means Flexible Monitoring System and it is a tool with which you can save yourself many headaches, as well as tailor it to your needs!

The American magazine “Fortune” specializes in global banking, business and finance… What does it have to do with monitoring? Well, in one of its annual lists, the Fortune 100 (the largest companies on the planet), 92 companies use Splunk software… If we compare by volume of money, yes, Splunk would be the best software and that’s where this article would end.

As mentioned in the last release 740, even updates will focus on fixing bugs and odd ones on developing new features and improvements that help all users. In this release 741, a new Discovery integration has been added to monitor SAP centrally and remotely, a system to report bugs and suggestions, in addition to Omnishell, the first step of Pandora FMS in the world of automation and IT infrastructure management.

Some of the most common questions we face daily are related to our future plans or the roadmap of Pandora FMS. Thanks to our customers and users, we know you expect us to integrate increasingly more features into the Pandora FMS interface and architecture. But it is not just about improving what we already have to make it more efficient, user-friendly and fast, but about going beyond, much further.