Cockpit 283
Monitor a server and do maintenance via a web interface? Yes please!
Cockpit is a remote system administration service. It can be installed using the package manager on most distributions. What you end up with is a set of management pages that can be accessed by a web browser over a network. A system like this has its uses in the server room, but it’s very easy to use, and it’s also worth knowing about for the average user who wants to carry out some admin and system monitoring remotely.
Cockpit comes into its own when managing a remote Linux box used as a server, and you can handle a lot of the administration features that you would otherwise have to access via the GUI admin tools of the distribution or via the command line.
The first page is a system overview that gives you real-time information about CPU core usage, memory, storage and disk use. There are long-term activity graphs at the bottom of the screen, and a summary page of notable events such as spikes in network activity. Like many of the features, the usefulness of this page is increased if you enable the PCP metric collector, as this archives data over a long period. To do this, click on the Metric button. Cockpit then requests permission to install the necessary components.
Of course, Cockpit is more than just a system monitoring utility and it has many system admin features. On the various pages, you can do things such as manage network devices, storage and services, and see a summary of pending system updates and carry them out. There is also a Terminal page for commandline access.
The Logs page employs some filtering to give you the most important information and can often prove particularly useful because its summaries throw up misconfigurations and warnings relating to issues of which you might not have been aware.
Throughout, the layout is clear and administration could hardly be simpler once you’re logged into Cockpit. Got a server sitting on the other end of a network or on the internet? For a lot of tasks, Cockpit could be the only remote admin tool you need.