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Argus Fleet (Panoptes)

One page for every machine you run agents on: which are up, what is running on them, and which one is waiting for you.

• Getting started — install it, run it, and see it with no machines at all
• Machines on the board — what a tile says, and the two ways a machine gets onto the board
• Starting and stopping — naming what a board may run, and turning an Argus off
• Colours, tints and notes — telling six tiles apart at a glance
• The journal — the three things that happen only on a board
• Security — what it holds, and what it cannot do
• Reaching it from outside — Tailscale, a tunnel, a certificate
• The API · Translating it · Development

What it is for

Argus puts a browser onto the tmux sessions on one machine. The moment there are three machines, the question changes: not what is this box doing but which box needs me.

Answering that by opening three tabs does not work, because the whole point is that you are not looking. You want one page that is worth glancing at, that tells you the one thing you cannot work out from anywhere else — an agent has stopped and is waiting for an answer — and that gets you to the right terminal in one click when it does.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m app.main            # prints a URL with a token in it
python3 -m app.main --qr      # and a code to photograph

That is the board. Then tell it about your machines, or tell your machines about it — both directions work, and which one you want depends on your network.

Important

Panoptes cannot get into anything. It holds one read-only key per machine, never sends one to a browser, and has no shell, no filesystem and no terminal of its own. Clicking through to a machine opens that machine's Argus, in its own origin, with its own token. Losing this board loses a list of session names.

_{Argus Panoptes — "the all-seeing" — had a hundred eyes, and some of them were always open.}

What it is not

• Not a way in. There is no terminal, no file browser and no command here. If you want those, that is Argus, on the machine itself.
• Not a monitoring system. No history, no graphs, no alert rules, nothing on disk. It says what is true now. If you need a year of metrics you want Prometheus, and the two are not in competition — this one exists to be glanced at.
• Not a scheduler. It starts nothing, stops nothing, and has no opinion about what should be running.
• Not multi-user. One token, one board, one person's machines.

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One machine? Argus is what a tile links to: the tmux sessions on that machine, its files and its documents, in a browser. Panoptes is the board over several of them, and neither needs the other to be useful.