Every one of us on the founding team has a VPN story. Mine involves a production incident at 11pm on a Friday and 90 minutes spent debugging a VPN concentrator that wouldn’t stay up. The database was fine. The VPN was the incident.
We’ve been running IT infrastructure for a long time, across a few different companies, and the pattern kept repeating: the tool we used to reach the system was less reliable than the system itself. That’s a strange state of affairs, and it’s most of the reason LynxTrac exists.
What it is
One agent, one console, one audit trail. It does:
- Real-time monitoring of servers and endpoints (CPU, memory, disk, network, the usual suspects).
- Browser-based SSH and remote desktop, without a VPN in front of them.
- Patch and application deployment, with approvals and rollback.
- Log aggregation with grouped exception tracking.
- Scripting and automation across the fleet.
If you’ve been stitching those five capabilities together with three or four different vendors, that’s the stitching we’re trying to remove.
Why we think it matters
The thesis is simple: most of what makes IT operations painful isn’t the work itself, it’s the getting to the work. VPNs, jumpboxes, credential rotation, tool sprawl. We wanted the reach to be as reliable as the tools everyone is trying to reach.
So the agent dials outbound to our relay instead of listening for inbound connections. You connect through your browser. The whole thing works behind NAT, across strict firewalls, without opening a port on your infrastructure. Nothing magical, just a different direction of travel.
Who it’s for
IT teams running 10 to 10,000 endpoints. MSPs running multi-tenant operations. Small shops that are tired of logging into five dashboards to answer one question. If you’ve ever said “I just need a shell on that machine” and then spent 15 minutes trying to get one, you’re the person we built this for.
Who it’s not for
Air-gapped environments can’t use it (the agent needs egress to our relay). Workloads that genuinely need kernel-level network tunneling still want a VPN. And anyone who’s entirely happy with their current stack doesn’t need another one, which is fine.
Where to start
Free forever on two servers. No credit card, no onboarding call, no pipeline from signup to “sales will get back to you.” Create an account and install the agent and you’ll be looking at live metrics within a couple of minutes.
If you’d rather see it working before installing anything, there’s a product tour on the homepage.
LynxTrac is free forever for up to 2 servers, no card required. If you want to try it on real infrastructure instead of reading about it: app.lynxtrac.com.
Related posts
Why we built LynxTrac: remote access without VPN headaches
The short version of why we ended up building our own remote-access platform instead of subscribing to yet another VPN. Mostly a story about tired ops people.
Inside the LynxTrac agent: lightweight, powerful, and fast
One binary covers monitoring, remote access, log shipping, and deployments. Keeping it under 15 MB and well under 1% CPU took some specific design choices.
10 reasons IT teams are switching to LynxTrac
The actual reasons teams give when we ask them, not a marketing tier-list. Some of them surprised us.