Beszel

What is Beszel?

Beszel is a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring platform that tracks resource usage across your machines and shows it on a single web dashboard. It uses a two-part design: a central hub (the web app and dashboard) and a small agent that runs on each system you want to watch and reports metrics back over an encrypted connection.

The hub is built on PocketBase, so the whole system stays a single small binary or container with no external database to run.

What is Beszel best for?

Beszel is best for homelabs, VPS fleets, and small teams that want at-a-glance health and history for a handful of servers without the weight or cost of a full observability stack. If you mainly need to know each box’s CPU, memory, disk, and container status — and get pinged when something spikes — Beszel covers it with a footprint measured in megabytes of RAM.

What can Beszel do?

• Monitor core system metrics — CPU, memory (including swap and ZFS ARC), disk usage and I/O, network bandwidth, and load average, with historical charts over time.
• Track Docker and Podman containers — per-container CPU, memory, and network stats alongside host metrics.
• Read hardware sensors — temperatures, fan speeds, battery status, S.M.A.R.T. disk health, ZFS pools, and GPU metrics for Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.
• Send configurable alerts — thresholds for CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, temperature, and system up/down status, delivered through Shoutrrr to Discord, Telegram, Slack, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, email, and more.
• Support multiple users — each user manages their own systems, and admins can share systems across the user base.
• Authenticate with OAuth2/OIDC — with optional password login you can disable entirely.
• Back up automatically — to local disk or S3-compatible storage, plus a REST API for custom integrations.

Where does Beszel fall short?

Beszel is deliberately narrow. It reports resource metrics at a coarse resolution (roughly one snapshot per minute), so it is not built for high-frequency, second-by-second profiling the way Netdata or a Prometheus stack is — you see trends and spikes, not fine-grained per-second detail.

It is also a metrics tool, not an uptime or logs tool. It does not do external HTTP/status-page checks (use Uptime Kuma or Gatus for that) and it has no log aggregation, tracing, or APM — the deep application-level observability that platforms like SigNoz and Datadog provide. The agent targets Linux and macOS natively; Windows runs through WinGet, Scoop, a compiled binary, or WSL2 rather than a first-class native installer.

Is Beszel free?

Yes — Beszel is fully free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tier, seat limits, or hosted-only features. You run both the hub and the agents yourself on your own hardware. The only cost is the machine it runs on, and that cost is small: the hub and agents are designed to be far lighter than commercial monitoring agents.

What does Beszel replace?

Beszel is a self-hosted stand-in for the server-monitoring slice of commercial platforms like Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace. It covers the “what are my servers and containers doing right now, and alert me when that changes” job those tools charge per-host for — without the recurring bill or sending your telemetry to a third party. It does not try to match their full APM, distributed tracing, and log-analytics feature sets.

FAQ

Is Beszel open source? Yes. Beszel is released under the permissive MIT license, and the full source for both the hub and the agent is on GitHub.

Can I self-host Beszel for free? Yes. Self-hosting is the only way Beszel runs, and it is completely free. Deploy the hub with Docker or a single binary, then install a lightweight agent on each server you want to monitor.

Is Beszel a good Datadog alternative? For small-scale server and container monitoring, yes — it delivers dashboards, history, and alerts at a tiny fraction of the resource use and none of the cost. For enterprise-scale APM, tracing, and log analytics, Datadog remains far more capable.

What do I need to run Beszel? A machine to host the hub (Docker or the standalone binary, backed by PocketBase — no separate database), plus the agent installed on each system you monitor. The agent installs via Docker/Podman, a single binary, Homebrew, WinGet/Scoop, or a Home Assistant add-on.