Front Seat
Keep All Your Linux Servers in Check
Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash
Use the browser-based Cockpit tool to monitor and administer multiple Linux servers without leaving your desk.
Special Thanks: This article was made possible by support from Linux Professional Institute
Managing a herd of computers is no small feat, which is why a system administrator is only as good as his or her tools. Keeping an eye on the different computers in the network requires a lot of work. You can spend a lot of time configuring various components and setting up scripts to ease some aspects of monitoring and administration. If you are short of time, though, there’s nothing better than Cockpit. Cockpit is easy to deploy, and you can use it to connect and manage machines across the network, start and stop services, inspect logs, manage storage, visualize system performance, and even deploy and control containers via Docker. Although designed for administrators, Cockpit’s lightweight and intuitive interface makes it ideal for home servers and small businesses.
Cockpit doesn’t take over or lock the administration duties at any time; if you tweak certain networking settings using the web-based interface, you can undo these settings from your server’s command line or vice versa. Also, Cockpit dynamically updates itself (Figure 1), so any changes you make to the server will be reflected on the browser interface within a few seconds. For instance, if you were to add a new Logical Virtual Manager (LVM) to the server, it would be available to the Cockpit interface for manipulation almost immediately.
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