We’ve been managing our Linux machines with SSH and a few Ansible playbooks for years. It worked great in the beginning, but now that the fleet’s grown, access and visibility are getting messy.
Is SSH still practical once you’re dealing with hundreds of devices? Curious how others are handling this.
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Replies (3)
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Participant
4 days ago
Feb 09, 2026
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Yeah, we hit that wall too. SSH is fine until devices start moving around.
Machines behind NAT, users off VPN, laptops that haven’t checked in for days. Suddenly half your fleet isn’t reachable when you actually need it.
And don’t even get me started on key management. Rotating keys, removing access when someone leaves, double-checking nothing’s left behind. It adds up fast once the team grows.
At some point we realized we were spending more time maintaining access than actually managing systems.
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Participant
3 days ago
Feb 10, 2026
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Hey guys, same here. That’s pretty much why we moved to agent-based management.
Based on my experience, once you cross a few hundred devices, SSH just doesn’t feel built for day-to-day fleet management. With an agent installed, the devices maintain an outbound connection to the management server, so we stopped worrying about VPN access or static IPs altogether.
What made the biggest difference for us was centralized control. Access is tied to admin roles and identity permissions instead of juggling SSH keys on every single box. If someone’s role changes, we update it once in the console and we’re done.
Also, visibility is way better. When we push an action to a few hundred Linux systems, we can immediately see what succeeded, what failed, and what’s just offline. No digging through playbook logs trying to piece things together.
SSH still has its place for quick troubleshooting sessions. But for actually managing a growing fleet, agent-based just feels cleaner and much easier to scale.
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Participant
3 days ago
Feb 10, 2026
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Exactly. At some point, Linux management stops being about logging into boxes and starts being about managing the fleet as a whole.
By the way, if you’re looking to go deeper, check this out https://www.hexnode.com/mobile-device-management/help/high-scale-linux-management/. I found it useful when we were thinking about scaling beyond a few hundred devices.
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