I've been looking for a way to give my students occasional access to system administration functions of the Linux-based servers. In my classes, we rarely need access to the console, or ssh terminal, or even log files, as our environments start the needed services at boot time, and our user interfaces are web-based.

I think I finally found something that works: Cockpit. With cockpit, you can monitor and administer services, such as starting and stopping servers, inspecting log files, and so on. It even has a built-in ssh terminal. The installation is super-easy (on Fedora,  RedHat Enterprise and CentOS anyway): just yum install cockpit, and start the cockpit service. You might need to add an SELinux module and allow port 9090 through your firewall (of course managing the risks of doing so!).

Try it out at cockpit-project.org. Read more about installation and setup at FedoraProject.org.