What it is

Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self-hosted, homelab-oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/beszel-agent for the agent.

The concrete problem it solves is the overhead of running full-scale monitoring stacks on small or personal infrastructure. Beszel is designed to be smaller and less resource-intensive than leading solutions, with setup that requires little manual configuration and works out of the box. It keeps historical data rather than only live readings, tracks Docker and Podman container statistics per container, and adds configurable alerting, so a self-hoster gets persistent metrics and notifications without assembling and tuning a heavier observability pipeline.

Key capabilities

• Historical CPU, memory, disk, disk I/O, network, load average, temperature, and fan speed metrics for the host system.
• Per-container CPU, memory, and network usage history for Docker and Podman containers, plus container status.
• ZFS tracking covering pool capacity, usage, health, I/O throughput, scrub status, and per-dataset usage.
• S.M.A.R.T. disk health, including eMMC wear and end-of-life reporting and Linux mdraid array health via sysfs where available.
• GPU usage and power draw for Nvidia, AMD, and Intel hardware, plus host battery charge.
• Configurable alerts for CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, temperature, fan speed, load average, and status.
• Multi-user support where users manage their own systems and admins can share systems across users, with OAuth2/OIDC authentication and the option to disable password auth.
• Automatic backup and restore to disk or S3-compatible storage, plus API access.

Who uses it and how

• Homelab operators monitoring several self-hosted machines from one hub dashboard, with an agent installed on each system.
• Administrators tracking container resource consumption per Docker or Podman container rather than only at the host level.
• Storage-focused users watching ZFS pool health, scrub status, and per-dataset usage alongside S.M.A.R.T. disk health.
• Teams that need per-user system ownership with admin-managed sharing, and that authenticate through an OAuth2 provider instead of local passwords.
• Operators who schedule automatic backups to disk or S3-compatible storage and consume metrics through the API.

Getting started

The README points to the quick start guide at beszel.dev, which covers installation and gets a deployment running in a few minutes. The hub and agent are distributed as the Docker images henrygd/beszel and henrygd/beszel-agent.

When to use it — and when not to

Beszel fits self-hosters who want historical metrics, container statistics, and alerts without the resource cost of a larger monitoring stack, and its MIT license and PocketBase-based hub keep the deployment small. A self-hoster still operates the hub, an agent on every monitored system, and any S3-compatible storage used for backups. The project carries a substantial open issue count, and the README directs support requests to GitHub discussions and a community Matrix room, so users should expect community-driven rather than