4 free tools to simplify Linux server management

If you've got more than one VPS running then Linux server management can give you nightmares. If you're like a lot of our readers, then you've got quite a few Linux servers deployed. And that means one of your biggest challenges is figuring out a simple way to manage all your servers from a single place. SSHing into different boxes to perform tasks like apt upgrades or restarting services is a killjoy. Yeah, I hear you out there saying... “Oh! You haven’t heard of multi-tabbed SSH tools like SmarTTY?” Listen, if you think multi-tabbed SSH tools are cool...well... Prepare to be blown away by how easy it is to manage your servers with these convenient but powerful tools.

The best free server management tools for easily managing multiple Linux servers at once

To qualify for this list, the software must be:

• Open-source
• Free to use
• Capable of monitoring/managing multiple servers
• Easy to install

Cockpit

Developed by RedHat, the Cockpit for Linux project really catches my eye. It's available to install via the regular package managers (such as apt/yum on Ubuntu/CentOS). It lets you manage services, add/remove users and much more via a web UI or for the seasoned sysadmin, via the terminal. Cockpit is self-contained, reuses existing privileges and works with minimal addons. You can start stop services (irrespective of whether they were started through Cockpit or not). It is easy to look at how storage is used and administer drives. Cockpit even supports container management giving you a list of available containers and their status (CPU/memory usage). To manage multiple Linux servers, you can install the software on multiple machines and mark one as the master. From within the Machines option of your Cockpit dashboard, you can view details of the other VMs through neat graphs.

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