A Roundup of MongoDB Management Tools

I’ve been working with MongoDB for a long time now. Back in the early days, there really were no management tools analogous to RDBMS tools (e.g. SQL Server Management Studio). Since then, things have changed significantly. It’s time to look around and see what management / monitoring tooling is around these days for MongoDB.

The news is good. There are many different options to choose depending on your platform and use-cases.

1. Robomongo, price: $0 / open-source, platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux
http://robomongo.org/

Robomongo — is a shell-centric cross-platform open source MongoDB management tool (i.e. Admin GUI). Robomongo embeds the same JavaScript engine that powers MongoDB’s mongo shell. Everything you can write in mongo shell — you can write in Robomongo!

Robomongo

Key features:

  • Full power of MongoDB shell with the ease of a GUI
  • Multiple shells
  • Multiple results
  • Autocompletion
  • View your MongoDB database as a hierarchical tree consisting of databases, collections, indexes and users
  • User management

My take: Robomongo is definitely my current favorite management tool for MongoDB. It beautifully blends the power of the mongo shell and JavaScript API with a classy and intuitive user interface. Basically every rich UI can be driven by shell commands and then further manipulated with the UI. Brilliant. The fact that it’s free and works on all platforms is nice too.

The shell, price: $0 / open-source, platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux
No url, comes with MongoDB itself.

The mongo shell is an interactive JavaScript shell for MongoDB, and is part of all MongoDB distributions.

shell

Key features:

  • Complete (albeit command-line only) access to MongoDB
  • Comes with MongoDB

My take: While the mongo shell might not be your favorite way work with MongoDB, it is very powerful and it’s always available. So you should take the time to learn it properly. Especially since you’ll need to know most of the features to take advantage of Robomongo above anyway.

Mongovue, price: $0 / $35 / $up, platforms: Windows

MongoVUE is an innovative MongoDB desktop application for Windows OS that gives you an elegant and highly usable GUI interface to work with MongoDB. Now there is one less worry in managing your web-scale data.

MongoVUE

Key features:

  • Gain a quick and effective overview of your database (size, usage, doc count, etc).
  • Easily build indexes – either specify Json or use the point and click (visual) interface
  • Run Map-Reduce operations easily. Get syntax highlighting for your Javascript functions while typing
  • View your MongoDB database as a hierarchical tree consisting of databases, collections, indexes and users
  • Import relational data from MySQL or SQLServer into MongoDB automatically and start building your applications right away
  • User Managment
  • Special GridFS interface
  • Limited shell support
  • Copy collections from a database to another database

My take: Mongovue has been around for awhile and is solid and affordable. I really like the “overview” view for a given database to see just how much space everything is using and how your data is growing.

LINQPad, price: $0 / $39, platforms: Windows
http://www.linqpad.net/
http://www.thinqlinq.com/default/Using-LINQPad-with-MongoDb-and-NoRM.aspx

LINQPad lets you interactively query databases in a modern query language: LINQ. Kiss goodbye to SQL Management Studio! LINQPad supports everything in C# 5.0 and Framework 4.5

linqpad

Key features:

C# “shell” rather than JavaScript shell.
Can leverage utility functions from your library
Directly work in the objects and classes of your application

My take: If you are writing .NET apps to talk to MongoDB do not overlook LINQPad. You can take your classes and queries directly from your app and test and view the results in this GUI. Follow Jim Wooley’s blog post link above to see how to put your classes in LINQPad to get started (you might not be using NoRM, so adjust accordingly).

REST view, price: $0 / open-source, platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux
http://localhost:28017/

REST-Mongo

Key features:

  • View contents and status of server with your browser
  • Check on performance and statistics
  • View the log file

My take: While this is just the basic REST API of MongoDB, you can monitor your log files, run commands using the REST API, and otherwise check in on your server. Not bad. Just requires the –rest command-line to mongod.

Genghis, price: $0 / open-source, platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux
http://genghisapp.com/

Genghis

Key features:

  • Basic database status, CRUD, etc.
  • Installs into your web app (provided you’re using Ruby or PHP)
  • View contents and status of server with your browser

My take: This is a very interesting web monitoring app. Just drop a single .RB or .PHP file on your server and you get a well rounded management tool. Only requires that you can run Ruby or PHP on your server.

MongoDB Monitoring Service, price: $0, platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux

MMS (MongoDB Monitoring Service) is a service for monitoring MongoDB infrastructure. MMS was created by 10gen and is provided for all users of MongoDB. Designed with security and ease of use, MMS collects statistics on all key server and hardware indicators and then presents the data in a powerful web console. The data is a great asset when optimizing applications during development and potentially invaluable when diagnosing production issues. For sharded clusters consisting of dozens of nodes, MMS is particularly useful because it provides a holistic overview of MongoDB deployments so that administrators can asses quickly the health clusters.

mms

Key features:

  • Allows secure access to your server’s stats and errors remotely
  • Great graphical dashboards about server usage
  • Error reports and logs
  • Alerts for server issues

My take: MMS is an interesting, free service from 10gen, the makers of MongoDB. It’s pretty easy and quick to setup.

Conclusion:

Hopefully you’ve found something new or interesting that can help you get started or keep going with MongoDB. The lack of management tools was hurting MongoDB’s adoption in the early days. I think those days are past.

Cheers,
@mkennedy

Michael Kennedy

A Python enthusiast and an entrepreneur. Host of Talk Python and Python Bytes podcasts, founder of Talk Python Training. Python Software Foundation Fellow.

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