Beszel

Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform with a hub-and-agent architecture. The hub runs as a Docker container and provides the web dashboard. An agent runs on each machine you want to monitor and communicates metrics back to the hub over SSH, which means no additional firewall ports need to be opened and nothing needs to be exposed to the public internet.

The dashboard shows CPU, memory, disk, and network usage with historical data, and tracks those same metrics per Docker or Podman container. Alerts fire on CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, temperature, load average, and system status. Notification channels include Discord, Slack, Gotify, and others via webhook configuration.

Built on PocketBase, the hub image stays small and the agent sits under 20MB. Setup takes a few minutes for the hub and a single command to add each new system. Multi-user support gives each user ownership of their own systems, with admins able to share access across the group. OAuth/OIDC login and S3-compatible automatic backups are included.

Compared to Grafana or Netdata, Beszel is narrower in scope but far simpler to run. It does not support custom dashboards, metric piping to external systems, or long-term retention beyond its built-in history. For a homelab or small server fleet where you want to know when something is wrong without a full observability stack, it covers that need with minimal overhead.