Administration
A second panel inside the panel — people, permissions, and whether the software running your server is actually well.
Everything else in this guide is about the server: its applications, its databases, its firewall. The Admin Panel is about the panel — who may sign in to it, what each of them may touch, and whether the panel itself is healthy enough to do its job.
It is a separate area with its own sidebar. You reach it from the account menu in the header (Admin Panel), and leave the same way (Exit to Server Panel).
Who can open it
One permission opens this whole area, and it is not one of the 38 in the role editor. It is the Admin Panel access switch on each user:
The first account you created at first login has it. Everybody else has it only if an administrator turned it on for them — see Users.
Admin Panel access is not a role
Roles decide what somebody can do to the server. Admin Panel access decides
whether they can manage users, roles and the panel itself. A user with
every role in the catalog still cannot create another user; a user with Admin
Panel access and no roles at all can hand themselves every permission there
is. Grant it like you would grant sudo.
The Admin Dashboard
The landing page answers four questions at a glance, in one row of tiles.
| Tile | Reads | Links to |
|---|---|---|
| System health | How many of the 17 checks passed, warned or failed | System health |
| Panel version | The installed version, and whether a newer one is out | Panel update |
| Failures | Distinct kinds of internal error in the last 100 records | Error log |
| Central | Whether a central panel is managing this server | Central |
Each tile has a fourth state the others do not advertise: Unknown. If the read behind a tile fails, it says so rather than showing green. A tile that cannot be read is not a tile that passed.
Needs attention
Below the tiles, the failed health checks and the recent command failures are interleaved into one ordered list, so you do not have to visit two screens to find out what is wrong.
Recent activity and Access
The feed is the admin activity log, collapsed: repeated events are folded into one row with a count and a time range, so "admin logged in 4 times, from 24 minutes ago to 19 minutes ago" takes one line instead of four.
The Access card beside it is the people summary — how many administrators exist, how many roles are configured, and when impersonation was last used. Never used is a real and reassuring answer.
The pages
Users
Add people, assign roles, reset passwords, and the two things you cannot do to yourself.
Roles & permissions
The 38-permission catalog, View versus Manage, and the protected Administrator role.
Login as a user
See the panel exactly as somebody else sees it, and get back out.
Admin activity log
Every action by everybody, unfiltered — the widest view the panel has.
System health
Seventeen checks that confirm the panel can actually run here.
Error log
Internal failures, grouped, with the command that ran and why it failed.
Panel update
Update OSS Panel itself — preflight, dry run, fourteen steps, rollback.
Central management
Hand a central panel the keys to this server, and take them back.