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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
66th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (26th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (58th), Log Management (59th), Cloud Monitoring Software (39th)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 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 1.7% 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

"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"Network monitoring is fun again with Pandora FMS."
"We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
"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."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"This tool has been of great help because we can manage faster solutions with the problems in our network and it helped us reduce our response time."
"It works better than other products I’ve used – namely SolarWinds, which is cumbersome and error prone for web app monitoring. SCOM is not."
"This solution saves us a lot of work because it reduces the effort that is required in order to start monitoring."
"SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS."
"We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool, preventing various problems and resolving issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, which assists our department in being pro-active in resolving issues with servers and services rather than reactive."
"Anything that can be accessed via SNMP commands, SCOM can retrieve via SNMP Gets."
"We like the deployment of the machines and the features that they have, and it's easy to use."
"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 System Center 2012 R2 is really powerful, all products work great together, is not so expensive anymore, easy to license, and can cover from end to end (Networking, Hardware layer, OS, App and services, ports, etc.)."
 

Cons

"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"In its versions for Linux, in the beginning, it can be somewhat complicated to configure and implement."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
"Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas."
"Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for me because I am a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade agents to be easier. 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. It has a complete GUI and everything."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"I would like to see better support for monitoring Unix-based systems."
"I’d like to see cross-platform support that would make SCOM a single enterprise monitoring application."
"The management of the servers could be better."
"This product has room for improvement in the way that it is administered."
"There are some negative points about this product. Sometimes, the capabilities of the software don't appear, and you can't directly see the results. You have to wait for a long period to refresh the policy to push it to the software or other patches."
"There were some deployment and configuration problems with the gateway server and overall this feature works a bit sloppy with other monitoring."
"Reporting could be improved, you get many reports out-of-box but they can be difficult to interpret and drill down into."
"I would like to see more standard libraries for the market solutions, out of the box, that you don't need to do a lot of work on."
 

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."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"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."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
21%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.