Viewing the list of services on your network

Tailscale’s services feature lets you monitor and easily connect to the services running on machines in your Tailscale network.

The services view is currently in alpha.

What are services?

Services are the network-exposed ports running on each of your Tailscale machines, defined by their port and protocol. If your network has enabled services collection, each of your machines will share its live list of services with your Tailscale network.

Enabling services collection

This feature is disabled by default, meaning that service data is never collected or shared between your devices unless you choose to enable services collection, which you can do from the services tab in the admin console.

A screenshot of the button to enable services collection.
Although services collection is a global setting for your Tailscale network, services will not be sent from any machines that are blocking incoming connections.

Monitoring your services

With services collection enabled, your admin console will display the list of services on your network. We don’t currently store services in our database, so the view acts as a monitoring tool for live services. As you start and stop services, you’ll see the view reflect those changes.

Below is a preview of the admin console services tab.

A screenshot of the services view.

A services table is also visible on each machine’s details page with just the services exposed by that machine.

A screenshot of the list of services exposed by one machine.
The services tables include a type column. We categorize services into types to help you better identify them. Our categorization rules are basic and will be tuned over time, so note that if you use an uncommon port, we may fallback to “Other” type.

Launching services

From the services tables, you can directly launch certain services.

  • For SSH, we show a copyable ssh 100.x.y.z command.
  • For VNC and RDP, we show a one-click Launch button to start a remote session.
  • For HTTP and HTTPs, we show a one-click Open button to open the web server.

Access controls

You can configure the access for each of your services using Tailscale ACLs. If you’re interested in knowing who can access each service, hover over the info icon in the Access Controls column of the Services table.

A screenshot of the services ACL preview, showing which users are allowed to access this service.
If someone has shared a machine from another network with you, their machine’s shared ports will be visible in your services list. Note that for shared machines you will only see the services that the sharer has given you access to via their network’s ACLs.