Chapter 1. Overview
Cockpit is a system administration tool that provides a user interface for monitoring and administering servers through a web browser. It allows you to monitor current values and adjust limits on system resources, control life cycle on container instances, and manipulate container images. Here are a few important facts about Cockpit:
- Cockpit does not add a layer of other functionalities that are not present on your systems. It exposes user interface elements that enable you to interact with the system.
- Cockpit does not take control over your servers, in a way that when you configure something from Cockpit, you can only manage it from there. You can effectively move away from Cockpit to the command-line and come back to it at any point.
- Cockpit does not require configuration or infrastructure, and once you install it, it is ready for use. You could, however, configure it to make use of the authentication infrastructure that is available to you, for example a single sign-on system like Kerberos.
- Cockpit has zero memory and process footprint on the server when not in use.
- Cockpit does not store data or policy. This also means it does not have its own users. The users from the systems can authenticate in Cockpit using their system credentials and they keep the same permissions.
- Cockpit dynamically updates itself to reflect the current state of the server, within a time frame of a few seconds.
- Cockpit is not intended for configuration management. This means that Cockpit itself does not have a predefined template or state for the server that it then imposes on the server. Cockpit can interact with other configuration management systems or custom tools that are manipulating server configuration.
This document provides instructions on how to install and enable Cockpit so you can monitor your servers, describes basic configuration, and walks you through the interface.
Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host can be used for the role of a Cockpit server and that of a secondary server. In this document, all monitored systems are Atomic, but the instructions also cover how to set up Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a primary server.
Cockpit does not yet have support for Kubernetes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host servers.
