ssh?

Ummm Webmin? Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned....

Btop tells me everything I need to know, and it does it with style.

Just SSH. Every public facing piece of software (I.e. a web interface) adds more complexity for misconfiguration or security vulnerabilities.

You can mount you remote filesystem locally and use your local file manager and text editors to manage most tasks. If you use ansible you can make changes to a local configuration and deploy the state to the server without needing to run anything special on the server side. It is especially effective if you also run docker.

And for monitoring I usually just have a tmux with btop running. Which is fine if you don't need long term time series data, then you might want to look at influxdb/grafana - but even those I would run locally behind a firewall, with the server reporting the data to the database.

Cockpit has been my go too, very quick to just get up and working plus including a web terminal for the rest of what you need.

Have a look at Netdata, Alerta and Prometheus.

Of all the things you mentioned Cockpit is the only sane one.

+1 for cockpit. Easy to install, easy on the eyes and makes things done.

I'm headless and mostly use containers, so I run lazy docker

I tried to install Cockpit on Debian, and it just downloaded an entire Linux Desktop? Really weird, had the configs and open port all but still the UI was not showing.

Might give it another try but would prefer something less resource heavy

I have found Nginx Proxy Manager to be a huge time-saver for configuring nginx and certbot.

I used ArozOS before, but I have now no usecase anymore for UIs for the host OS

Glances

I tried out some of these today. Umbrel, CapRover and Tipi aren't on your list yet.

They look beautiful and have some nice prebuilt installations but it gets really ugly soon as you need a custom component. I just deleted it all and switched over to portainer.

I tried installing gnome to rdp into my oracle free tier server and it wasn't remotely (hehehe) worth it. Very laggy and direct interfaces are just far superior so no to that as well. Plus it takes up precious space and resources.

I think the best option is a dashboard like dashy or homepage to keep your service interfaces together. Portainer is excellent for container management.

These weird "OS" style container platforms are really bizarre and I don't think too well thought out. They're kinda toys really. Looked really amazing but they show their limitations really quickly.

Netdata is great for monitoring

What you want is monitoring: how about looking for monitoring services? I found monit recently and would like to try it. Simple SNMP would do too I think

Cockpit as web UI, and SSH otherwise

Cockpit.

I use Froxlor. But it's less about resources and more about webhosting. Just makes it easier for me to control domains, databases and e-mail addresses.

It's not as deep in the system like Webmin but still gives me enough control to do special stuff.

Portainer has been great. I almost don't need ssh

I just use ssh for management. Monitoring is handled by nagios.

lxc-ls -f

Shows me what is running and that's about it.

Do you have links to SartOS and Orb?

A bit off-topic, but why do many self hosting-related stuff tries to "reinvent the wheel" so to speak with things that exists even on smart tvs nowadays? Even then, who is gonna edit videos (for example) on a smart tv? "Oopsie, time to get my mouse and keyboard and do some heavy video editing on my TV!"

@ontopic, eh. btop is enough for me as well. Maybe glances if I'm feeling "haxxor" enough. :^)