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I'm very excited to see a few more admin GUIs for working with MongoDB out there. I'm on Windows so I decided to try MongoVUE. Works great! I really haven't used it for a lengthy period of time, but my first reaction is that it's really good. For the OS X users out there, I think MongoHub might be worth taking a look at. 

So how to connect? Well, if you're working locally, it should be pretty trivial...But what if you're trying to connect to a firewalled server? Tunnel time. However, MongoVUE (I don't know about MongoHub) doesn't have built in tunnel support. That's probably the only thing I don't like about it so far. Not to worry though, you can simply make an SSH tunnel using PuTTY (or KiTTY, which I like better). Here is a really good article on how to setup a tunnel, it takes no time at all. After you're done, connect to localhost on the port you defined for the tunnel and you should be set!

MongoVUE gives you several ways to view the data in your collection. You can use the "text" view which shows you a JSON string that you're probably used to see in the mongo console, but you can also choose a tree and table view which is probably what you're hoping to see with an admin GUI for any database. The only other thing I might like to see is an actual console within this tool so you can manually enter commands. While I don't see that (if it's there somewhere) I do see that it will return the commands used while browsing and performing actions with the GUI. This is nice because you can then copy and paste those commands to an actual terminal window or something. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing feature enhancments for this tool.