I am not an admin, but I have to manage around 10 linux servers. These servers are all over the world, some are used as production servers, others as staging or development servers.
Currently there is no centralized management of these servers. If I have to create a user, I have to manually do so on all machines, I have to add them to a group manually (and re-read man pages to see how it is done), edit sudoers file, etc.
All these machines run our custom software, so I need a way to monitor the the processes (could be as simple as repeatedly doing 'ps -ef' to make sure it is up).
I have seen some software to centrally manage machines, such as nagios, webmin, redhat's spacewalk, ubuntu's landscape and many variants.
- I prefer free software, but am willing to pay small amount (appropriate for two/three people startup) if it is easy to configure/manage
- Looks like process/machine monitoring (nagios) is usually separate from managing users (webmin), which is still different from package management (landscape/spacewalk)...true?
- Now that cloud computing is becoming popular for small shops (many of them run by devs, without admins), aren't there easier (and better looking) tools to easily manage multiple machines (virtual or real)?
- Again, because of cloud computing, many middle ware vendors are including rest based interfaces--are there tools that let me use these interfaces from a single 'dashboard?'