The web console is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 web-based interface. It is built with Cockpit technology, and is designed for managing and monitoring a Linux host. Users administer their system with the graphical interface, without requiring command-line tool knowledge. To perform privileged tasks in the web console, users must be configured for privileges with RHEL sudo configuration.

Figure 2.1: web console

Most Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 deployments install the web console by default. If necessary, install the cockpit package to obtain the web console.

[root@host ~]# yum install cockpit

Use the systemctl command to enable and start the cockpit.socket service.

[root@host ~]# systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

The web console uses existing system user names and passwords. If you are logging in with a user account with sudo privileges, you can perform privileged tasks in the web console, such as installing software or configuring SELinux.

Running privileged tasks requires entering your user password each time, as you do when running sudo commands on a command line. Alternatively, to avoid re-entering your password for each privileged task, select Reuse my password for privileged tasks on the login screen.

After successful authentication, the web console displays the Overview page.

Extend web console capabilities by installing available add-on packages with yum.

[root@host ~]# yum install add-on

This table lists available add-on applications for the web console.

The web console provides observable data for troubleshooting with the Utilization Saturation and Errors (USE) Method. The USE method is a checklist for solving performance issues quickly, by observing utilization, saturation, and errors for each expected resource.

The Overview → Perfomance Metrics page displays a chronological view of historical data, and lists events, errors, and graphical representations for resource utilization and saturation.

To access the data, navigate to the Overview page, and click the View details and history link.

Figure 2.2: Performance metrics in the web console

The web console Logs page provides an interface for displaying journalctl log journals. Log entries can be filtered by Time, Priority, Identifier, and Text patterns.

Figure 2.3: Logs in the web console

The Session Recording capability is new with the web console, and is based on the tlog package. The web console session player can record and play back user terminal sessions. The session player captures terminal input and output and stores the session in a text format in the system journal.

To enable session recording, install the cockpit-session-recording package, and ensure that the sssd service is enabled and started.

[root@host ~]# yum install cockpit-session-recording
[root@host ~]# systemctl status sssd

Configure the sssd-session-recording.conf file to specify the user or user groups to record, and the session scope:

[root@host ~]# cat /etc/sssd/conf.d/sssd-session-recording.conf
[session_recording]
scope=none
users=
groups=

You can configure session recording for users and scope in the web console, on the Session Recording page. Click the gear icon to open the General Config form and select the wanted options.

Figure 2.4: Session recording in the web console

Figure 2.5: Session Recording General Config