Review: 4 free, open source management GUIs For MongoDB

Above the statistics pane, a context-aware menu alters its contents based on which object is selected in the navigation pane. For example, choose a database in the navigation pane, and the menu becomes:

• Database. Items on this menu let you create a new collection, refresh the display (in the navigation pane), or drop the selected database.
• Command. From here you can issue commands in either BSON form or as JavaScript code submitted to the server. This menu also has a selection that will list the available commands as a BSON document (it's not the simplest thing to read). Another selection will issue a dbstats command for retrieving the latest statistics from the database, such as the number of objects, average object size, index size, and so on.
• User. Here you can authenticate an existing user or add or remove users. The authenticate command works only if authentication is enabled for the database (by default, it is not). It is effectively a login command for the user name and password specified.
• Sharding. This menu exists both at the server and the database level. At the server level, the menu selections will list the shard servers that are currently in the cluster, add a shard server to the cluster, or remove a shard server. Here you'll also find a flush operation, which flushes the cached metadata in the mongos process. At the database level, items on this menu let you enable sharding for the database, display shard-specific information about the database (for example, which member of the cluster is the primary shard server), and move the primary server to another member of the cluster.
• GridFS. This menu selection lets you manipulate files in MongoDB's GridFS file system (assuming you've defined one for the database you're connected to). It opens a file browser from which you can upload files into the GridFS, or download files, which copies the files out of the GridFS.
  The GridFS menu also provides a selection to delete GridFS files. Sadly, the response document only indicates whether the delete command executed -- not whether the deletion actually occurred. You have to watch the document count that is displayed next to the fs.files collection in the database navigation tree displayed in the left-hand pane.
• Tools. This menu also differs depending on whether a server, database, or collection is selected. At the server level, you can enable or disable auto-balancing (the process that MongoDB runs to keep shards balanced across the members of a sharded cluster). Or you can regenerate the configuration database, which is the server's internal description of the cluster configuration.

If you've selected a database, the Tools menu provides selections for repairing a database, changing the profiling parameters, adding a JavaScript function to the database (MongoDB's equivalent to SQL's stored procedures), and setting various parameters associated with the database. For example, you can choose whether reads are submitted to the primary, the secondary, or to either with no preference given.

Finally, at the collection level, the Tools menu has entries that let you validate the structure of the collection, rebuild a collection's indexes, compact a collection, set various database options associated with collections, and so on.