Managing Hundreds of Servers Without Losing Your Mind

The Scaling Problem

Managing 5 servers is easy. You remember the hostnames, the usernames, which key goes where. At 50 servers, you need a system. At 200 servers, most engineers are living in SSH config files with hundreds of lines, using grep to find the right entry.

JumpTerm's connection manager is designed for this scale. Every connection is a searchable, taggable, organizable entry in your vault. Full-text search across hostnames, usernames, tags, and notes means you can find any server in seconds.

Organization Strategies

We recommend organizing connections by environment first (production, staging, development) and by function second (web servers, databases, workers, monitoring). Use color labels for environment -- red for production, yellow for staging, green for development -- so you always know what you are connecting to at a glance.

Tags are more flexible than folders. A server can be tagged "production", "web", "us-east-1", and "team-alpha" simultaneously. Filter by any combination of tags to narrow your view.

Import and Export

JumpTerm can import connections from ~/.ssh/config, PuTTY session exports, and CSV files. This makes migration from other tools straightforward. You can also export your connection list (without credentials) as CSV for documentation or sharing with your team.

For teams, shared vaults provide a better approach: add connections to a shared vault and all team members with access see them automatically. Changes propagate in real time, so onboarding a new team member means giving them vault access and they are immediately set up.