One of the pain points in server management area is that there are not a great deal of free management tools for multiple server installations.

We will explore Cockpit project, a multi-server management tool sponsored by Red Hat which includes several advanced features.

Here is our setup:

Any recent Ubuntu Server should work (except 14.04 which is not recent) with all the commands provided.

Cockpit also supports many other Linux distributions; please check their installation page to see more.

In this aritcle, we are using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS VPS server from BitLaunch.

Let's prepare our servers for our setup. We will update the local package index and upgrade any packages that are outdated on both server.

Installing Cockpit is quite easy as it is already included in the default package repositories. Both servers should be installed as follows.

We will mention Cockpit Master server, however, the installation and configuration is same for both. Master is the instance that we will use the GUI and use to connect to other Cockpit instances.

We need to allow port 9090 for external access to our Cockpit master server. It is always better practice to only allow from your own IP addresses that it's restricted to others.

Please note that we only need this on Cockpit master as Cockpit instances will talk over SSH.

Cockpit web server listens on port 9090. It listens with a self-signed sertificate so the "Your connection is not private" dialog will appear. Click advanced and proceed. (Names may change depending on your browser)

Here we are going to explore the screens provided by Cockpit.

In the overview screen, we can see general health and system information / configuration as well as cpu and memory usage.

Here we can see our system logs, it can be filtered by date, severity and service.

The storage section shows our disks and related information. A read/write graph is shown as well.

We can see our network interfaces here including rx/tx graphs.

In accounts, we can manage the accounts in our system. We can create accounts, change account setings and add Authorized Public SSH Keys as well.

This is the account detail page, where we can change password, lock, and add authorized SSH keys.

We can view all system services in this screen. Click the service to see additional information and actions you can perform on the service.

One of the great features of the Cockpit, we have terminal access to all our servers.

Now let's add our Server 2 to the Cockpit. We need to go to dashboard and click the plus button. After typing our second servers IP address and clicking Add button, Cockpit will try to connect to our server.

Cockpit will use SSH to connect to the remote server. Authentication can be done by password or SSH authorized keys which is preferred.

Now we can monitor both of our servers from a single dashboard. We can switch between servers by clicking over them for detailed host features.

Here is a list of alternatives to Cockpit. It is recommended to try and find the most beneficial to you. All these tools have different advantages that need to be evaluated.

Some are focused on email/websites and hosting unklike Cockpit.

ISPConfig is another multi-server management tool that is popular among system admins.

Webmin is another server management tool, however it is not capable of managing multi-server setups.

WHM/Cpanel is for managing a single server. However, it includes a great detail of tools to manage said server.

Please note that WHM/Cpanel is not free and restiricted to Linux distributions.

Plesk has a Multi Server extension so that you can manage multiple Plesk installations from a single point.

Please note that Plesk is also not free.

We have explored Cockpit in detail, which is a great management tool for your servers. You can connect to and monitor all your servers from a single point.

As always, It is best to install and try many management tools, including the ones listed, to try and find the one most suitable to your workflow.