Right so you been running a web server for a long time now… How do you know that every thing is running right? and how do you monitor every thing?  Well here is a list of 10 Sysadmin apps every system admin should know of:

1. htop – This is htop, an interactive process viewer for Linux.
2. iotop – Iotop is a Python program with a top like UI used to show of behalf of which process is the I/O going on.
3. mytop – mytop is a console-based (non-gui) tool for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL Server.
4. iftop –  It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts.
5. iptraf – IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts.
6. apachetop – This is a console-based (non-gui) monitoring tool which reads the server-status pages from one or more Apache servers and combines the information onto one easy monitoring screen.
7. munin – Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends.
8. screen – Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes.
9. ossec – OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.
10. kippo – Kippo is a medium interaction SSH honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and, most importantly, the entire shell interaction performed by the attacker.

You can install any of them just by running:

apt-get install <name>

Know of a system administration application that helps you out? Share it in the comments below.

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