hi guys and welcome back to another imprecorp video what an absolute pleasure to have you guys
back here it's really really exciting thanks for your patience while we get another video out there
in today's video we're going to be going through the top 10 tools that we've found and those
provided by our community to help you administer and manage your server now while today we'll be
showing you examples on unraid for our unraid community pretty much all of these run in docker
so it can work in anywhere that docker is used which is pretty much on every platform these days
so even if you're not using unraid the containers that we're going to show you or the apps we're
going to show you today are still applicable to be used on any other service now before we
get started i just want to say a big thank you to everyone who has helped support the channel would
really appreciate all your support thanks to you we've now hit 6 000 subscribers that's exciting
and a lot of people tend to ask why we don't have more subscribers and look pretty much it comes
down to algorithms if you enjoy our work and you like what we're doing please help by liking the
videos and sharing them around in your communities to help get the word out there so i hope you're
excited these are the 10 that we've narrowed down just to be clear they're in no particular order so
not one is better than the other these are just the top 10 that we've been able to compile and
this has been through feedback from our community as well so not just something that myself have
picked out or my team this is something that we've asked the community to give us some feedback about
and some of these i haven't even been using until i put this list together and i can assure you that
after putting the list together i'll be using most of these myself as well so don't be surprised if
you see them in upcoming videos and the final note i want to make is if you like one of the apps that
we cover in today's video because it's going to be brief and an overview if it's something you want
to see in detail drop it in the comments below let us know your thoughts and we'll go into it
a little bit deeper in a future video as well so without further ado let's just get stuck into it
number one scrutiny now a lot of people that i've spoken to haven't actually known
about scrutiny or they've seen it and sort of passed on and not knowing what it was
and i found it just by accident one day to be honest looking through the community app store i
can't believe i hadn't found it sooner it's really a decent app that gives you clear cut information
on your disks and drives without anything set up crazy on your system it works completely out
of the box and uses a built-in sql light database so it's really fresh really clean gives you a lot
of information so here's the github page just so you're aware there's a whole lot of information
that's in here as well how how it reports how it works how you deploy it on docker for example
all the configuration options that you can set up for example notifications whether you have a debug
mode web server api and all that stuff built into it now the beauty of unraid for us here that are
using unraid is that it's on the community app store so as soon as you go into the community
app store you'll see scrutiny on there i'm going to give you a look at what it looks like using
my web ui here so here you can see what mine looks like and it pretty much gives you the
smart status the temperature the capacity and how long the drive has been powered on for and
all this information has been logged straight into the app and i never really had to set anything up
if for some reason you want to go into the settings you can go into settings here and you can
sort out a couple of extra features so you can say what's the critical you know error threshold that
i want to see before i'm alerted for nvme settings what settings do i want to have in there or the
scsi settings as well so what you consider the critical warning threshold for it you can then see
a temperature range as well so you know if you're worried about temperature in your drives whether
you're getting enough airflow this is going to give you that information really really important
if you go to a particular disk then you can actually see even more information so you can dial
down to you know what threshold's been hitting lately what sort of errors it's been getting
uh serial numbers any sort of attributes you know you can see all of that information in
there easy to see now there is a feature for exporting but it says as a highlight not yet
implemented so if that's something that's going to be coming out in future i believe
look as it is it's a pretty decent application i'm sure if you wanted to get the data out we
can do that through the file directory but it just sits there runs passively and gives you a
nice clear view of your drive so definitely one i recommend for managing and looking over your array
and all your disks as well even in the cache for example with any nvmes you might have on board
next up is midnight commander now whether you know about it or not it's a very powerful tool
that will allow you to manage your server through the command line having ultimate permission
and avoiding any sort of conflict issues the alternative to midnight commander is something
like crusader so if you haven't used crusader if we left click and go to web ui crusader is a
nice interface it gives you a nice graphical user interface so that you can manage your files on the
system and crusader is pretty easy to use as you can see it's got some shortcuts down the bottom
here that we can use with the keyboard to allow us to for example edit stuff in the browser itself
to view the documents to change them to make directories all that sort of stuff but the most
powerful tool that you can actually use on android is midnight commander so i'll show you that now
so we've gone into unraid and we've clicked to open the terminal in the terminal window we just
type mc next thing you know you're presented with this screen so in the terminal now we can actually
use our keyboard to use this interface which looks very similar to crusader except it bypasses any
sort of permission issues you'll have absolutely no problem because it doesn't run in a container
we're running it straight on the system itself so for example if i just go back here there's all of
our different directories so if i go to mnt then we go to user app data and then we've got all of
our app data folders here so if i go to matomo for example go to config so if for example if you're
having issues deleting a particular file or coming across some permission issues it's probably best
to do it through here so then when you go into here you can use the correct option and delete the
file and most of the time it will allow you to do so without running into any permissions problems
next up while we're on the subject is matomo as a systems administrator you probably have
some websites and urls that you're hosting yourself at home even if they're not hosted
at home perhaps you want to see the analytics of those websites without giving them to the big text
for example google analytics so instead you can have this hosted yourself so that you have 100
data ownership as it says there on the page here we are on their website and you can see
the different options that you've got now you can try matomo in the cloud and in that case
it would be costing a price however if you want to host it on premise it's completely free and
open source as you can see the user interface is actually pretty clean there's not a lot in
there to confuse you in fact i find it a lot cleaner than google analytics itself which can
be quite convoluted with all sorts of information in there that you probably will never actually use
from my personal experience matomo is probably on par or better than google analytics the
best part about of course is that you can tell your customers that their data is safe
and without having to hand it off to big text to manage for you here's a couple of keynotes
it is open source like we said it's 100 accurate according to their claims enhanced insights it's
easy to use and tracking personal data is not a thing next up in the list is adminer
i've done plenty of videos with adminer using it as a tool when we're using you know other videos
or setting up databases but adminer gives you a graphical user interface to manage your databases
now i'm not focused on just the one product there is another option there for you as well
which is php myadmin works exactly the same just a little bit different in the interface and how
it might be managed conversely to php myadmin over here as it says it consists of a single file ready
to deploy to the target server so similar products they go about things a little bit differently
so it's really up to you and if you haven't seen it before be sure to check out our creating a
maria db database with adminer and you'll get a nice insight into how it works and what it does
like i said like everything else it's very easy to install using the community apps on unraid
which is basically docker on any other system so the container is pretty straightforward
i highly recommend you use it just makes life a little bit easier when you're managing databases
next up is somewhat of a controversial one depending who you ask and that's putina
the reason why i say controversial is in the unread world we already have a doctor management
interface which is built into unraid in some cases though you might find that the unread ui
doesn't provide enough functionality and so you want to look at a different tool so portena allows
you to have a central management panel to manage all your docker containers but further you can
also use kubernetes and a very easy way to manage and deliver containers as a service
so as i said kubernetes is hard and so they try to make it as easy as possible by giving you the
interface to manage it a lot simpler maybe perhaps you want to stack multiple containers together
that sort of functionality for example docker compost isn't built directly
into unraid and so having a tool like portena could be the key to help you get there
some key notes it helps developers adopt containers so make it easy for developers
to deploy the applications without extensive training so if you're a developer it could be
quite beneficial for you there it's very efficient you can fully automate app deployment so you can
do that you know from end to end and develop those workflows so that it's completely automated you
don't even have to be a part of the process once you've set it up you can then deploy even further
you can then secure your container platform now like i said with unraid house already has
the built-in functionality which you would not be exposing to the web so since you're not exposing
unraid server to the web unless you're using something like tail scale following our video
on that then having portena can be a secure way for you to manage your containers without having
to jump into your unread server remotely next up which has become easily one of my favorite tools
is dozel for those using containers whether it's unraid or anywhere else you're using docker
checking the logs is absolutely vital just like anything in the computer world troubleshooting can
be difficult so the harder it is to troubleshoot the longer it's going to take to fix it the tool
like dozel for example makes that super easy doesn't matter how many containers you've got
dozer will make it super simple as it says it's a small lightweight application with a web-based
interface to monitor docker logs it doesn't store any log files and it's for live monitoring
of your container logs only just to give you an example here it is deployed on our unraid server
so on the main page you can see all right how many containers we've got how many are running and what
version of dozer we've got here but also show you the recent starts in what order they started
then you can go to all for example now on the left hand side we've got the actual container so if i
click on a container let's say add miner here's a complete log of what's going on so we can have a
nice easy way to see what's happening perhaps you want to see what orthelia is doing or better yet
bizarre what about dozel itself you really can't get any easier and it makes it very
easy to troubleshoot in a nice clean way if you go to the settings you've got some
more options here for example what sort of display you want for your time time stamps
what sort of font whether you want to search within the logs you can do that as well
showing any stop containers and changing the theme so we can change it to a light theme there
all you people watching in the dark are probably going to be upset by that next up is net data
or net data depending where you are in the world this one was a new one to me and i can
tell you right now it's definitely going to be staying on my server the amount of detail that
this application provides is absolutely phenomenal and i highly recommend it for all administrators
to get something like this set up to give you real peace of mind and information on what your server
is doing and what all the applications inside of it are doing so in a similar vein to some of the
apps we've shown it does give you logs but it also gives you really rich information stuff to
make it easier to work with it supports hundreds of integrations thousands of metrics zero config
and that's the most important part i've used tools similar to this before and you know it was just an
absolute headache to try and integrate into all these different sockets to get it to work this
just works out of the box you can't complain with that i'm going to show you exactly what it looks
like here on our server so we're using the netdata hyphen glib c version and this one supports nvidia
graphics cards as well so very useful if you're trying to monitor your graphics cards
we'll go to the web ui now this is completely out of the box guys i haven't configured anything i
haven't even gone into the settings this is exactly as it is right from the start
so you could have this as a potential dashboard application sitting up on a screen with your
server whatever the case might be giving you all that detailed information on the right hand side
we've got a very long list now on that list we've got all sorts of different information that we
can narrow down to so if we want to have a look at cpu for example here's our cpu tab
if you wanted to go even further you've got utilization interrupts throttling all of that
underneath cpus what about memory we can go have a look at our memory and see what that's doing
you know get detailed information exact seconds of what's happening now i've never seen anything
this detailed but this clean even our discs are supported so if you didn't want to use scrutiny
you do have the option to do something like this i still think scrutiny is perfect where
it is and has its place this is giving us a different sort of view on what's happening
so let's go to plex for example under plex we can see a quick view of what it's doing how
much resources it's using but then we can narrow it down and see the exact core that it's using
how much memory is being chewed up the amount of used memory and swap memory for example so
all of this information is completely vital i mean you need to know what your server is doing
we can even narrow down to our sensors on the computer itself so if we want to know temperatures
for example that's being monitored too plenty of features here that again we won't be able to
cover all of it today but you can pause play and get that information print it to the dashboard
so if you wanted to do that that would work you can export snapshots you can even import
snapshots and check news and check version down the left hand side we can go to settings
and then you've got more settings in here to help customize it the way that you like
so yeah definitely one that you guys should pick up pretty much straight away for our next one
we've got uptime coomer now in a previous video i've done a video on k-shirt and how to get that
working and look k-shirt is good it did have a lot of stuffing around and like i said we want to try
to make things as easy as possible that was quite a while ago so now we've got a new up-to-date
application that's been sort of catching a lot of attention and that's this app uptime coomer it's
a self-hosted monitoring tool like uptime robot now if you look at its interface it looks very
similar to uptime robot nice and clean i really like it and again it works really easily right
out of the box and there's a lot of features in here that make it easy to monitor so it's
not just you know a get request to see whether the website is up you can actually configure
all the sorts of different codes that you want for example if you guys are using cloudflare
if the website is offline but cloudflare is still presenting its 502 page that's something that a
lot of things won't allow you to monitor it'll basically assume that the website is up unless
it gets a 404 whereas you know cloudflare might give you a 503 error or a 526 error for example
this will allow you to customize it down to that level and did i mention it's free
you've also got notifications ready to go straight into it
20 second intervals ping charts certificate information so if you you know you want to monitor
how long your certificates got on it it's all there really simple to set up again through the
community app store it was straight plug and play we didn't need to do any special configuration
and i highly recommend it if you're managing websites and you just want to know when it's up
next up is putty now if you guys are familiar with using ssh then putty is a tool that you've
probably already used or planned to use in the future now putty is typically installed
on your client machine however with the beauty of docker it's been brought into a container for us
so we can actually use putty straight in a docker container and be able to access it wherever we are
in the world for example so here for example we've opened it up using our container and we can pretty
much type in any host we want and connect to it that way all within our browser without having
to set up or install anything separately straight out of the box and guys last but not least we're
going to be mentioning go access a really useful tool go access is an open source real-time web
log analyzer it's also an interactive viewer that runs in a terminal as you can see from
these screenshots go access is a very very nice looking way to check out all of your data
right inside your browser so without having to worry about it too much we can actually see all
the information that's coming through our network interfaces how much data everything right down to
you know 404s for example or static requests what are the visitors host names and ips where
are they coming from you know operating systems so this gives you very very detailed information
on who's getting access to your server and what information they're getting how much data they're
getting you're even getting referrals and virtual hosts for example so it works in conjunction with
our things like matamo for example you've got some extra options to customize the appearance really
useful app i think it's very important especially if you're someone that's reverse practicing your
information out there highly recommend you check that one out so guys i hope you enjoyed that
so guys i hope you enjoyed that that was our top 10 tools video to help you get the most out
of your server and become a real administrator getting vital information on what your server
is doing i'm sorry i couldn't cover every single app in great detail but it allows you to get a
grasp on some really nice tools that you can go and have a play with and like i said if there's
something that you guys want to see in more detail that that's piqued your interest please
by all means drop it in the comments below and we can't wait to see you in the next record video
you