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Let’s take a look at two tools that can make life easier for the Linux admins by automating his day to day tasks.
Puppet
Puppet is an open-source tool designed to make automation and reporting much easier for system administrators. It is basically a configuration management software that helps in configuring and maintaining your servers and other systems in your network. Generally, Server administrators spend a lot of time doing the same task again and again daily. They always wanted to automate these tasks, so as to get more time to work on other projects or learn new concepts and scripting languages. Tasks can be automated by writing scripts, but in companies with a larger network, scripts don’t come in handy. This is where Puppet comes to the rescue as with the help of Puppet one can:
- Let’s you define unique configuration setting for every host on the network
- Monitor the network continuously for any alterations
- Helps in creating and managing users effectively
- Helps you to manage every open-source tool’s configuration settings
Ansible
Ansible is an open-source configuration management and IT enterprise automation software from Red Hat and it comes with a simple programming language enabling system administrators to effectively handle the automation and configuration process easily and effectively. Ansible consists of a controlling machine and the nodes being controlled by the controlling machine. The nodes are controlled over SSH. One of the main features of Ansible is that agents are not deployed to the nodes, but only communication is done through SSH. A low learning curve, consistency, high reliability and security are other features that make Ansible stand ahead of the competition. The only limitation of Ansible is that provisioning of bare metal and a virtual machine is not possible.
Nagios
Nagios, now known as the Nagios Core and it is an open-source automation and monitoring tool to manage all systems in your infrastructure. It also offers to alert services to alert the system administrators when it smells something fishy in your network. With the help of SNMP with Nagios, the system admins may also control and manage printers, routers and switches. Nagios allows us to create an event handler that can restart the faulty application and its services automatically whenever application and its services go down.