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Pandora FMS vs SCOM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
64th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (26th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (59th), Log Management (59th), Cloud Monitoring Software (38th)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
26th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.4%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.4%
Pandora FMS0.7%
Other97.9%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Asociado/ at Infraestructura Informática
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."
"The support is excellent for this product; their response time is very fast, and they are very knowledgeable."
"Pandora's architecture is interesting; it's open so you can easily extend and enhance it, it's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions, and it's also scalable enough to support large environments."
"We are consultants and thanks to Pandora can detect a lot of disasters that other companies can't, and we can offer high availability of the system to the client."
"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"If I have to choose any one product for server monitoring to take care of all aspects of monitoring out of the box, SCOM is number one."
"The stability has been great."
"We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes."
"Mature product, strong brand, many customers, Gartner awards Excellent Microsoft server/application monitoring capabilities Fast and consistent UX for system admins Extensive dashboarding capabilities REST API available Excellent technical support, rich user community Designed for on-premise installations"
"The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool."
"The solution's reporting engine has given me detailed information on which applications or services I've either failed or about to fail in terms of the predictive makeup on Azure cloud."
"SCOM provided end-to-end monitoring for all aspects of the infrastructure, including web sites, network devices, databases and applications."
"We can easily scale-up when we have a new global site, and it is just so easy to extend this solution to other sites, which is an advantage."
 

Cons

"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these."
"The product lacks APIs for integration with other systems and we have issues with monitoring."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way."
"An update to the Android app would be appreciated."
"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."
"The console feature is very poor, and it would be very good for us if this were improved."
"In terms of features that could be improved, I would say the agent integration into the operating system. We are having difficulties integrating Linux into some of the networking devices."
"Unfortunately, when you need to monitor member servers which are not joined to the same domain as the SCOM servers, you need to go through the certificate route (so that you can have the required trust through the certificate). This is very time consuming and very prone to error."
"The console was not stable at the early versions of 2007 product, opening multiple consoles might cause a crash, and the web console might hang when opening multiple sessions as well."
"The solution should have more tools for monitoring the cloud engine versus on-premise."
"SCOM's feature that notifies us when a server is down is not present in recent updates, which has weakened the product."
"They could provide better dashboards, detailed logs, and reports crucial for monitoring services in real-time."
"In future releases, I would like to see APM solutions and dashboards like Grafana."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
20%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
What is your primary use case for SCOM?
My usual use case for SCOM is as an administrator role where I create reports and provide system configuration for Linux and installation of the SCOM agent. I handle deploying and upgrading the age...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.