Self-Host Beszel: Lightweight Server Monitoring 2026

TL;DR

Beszel (MIT, ~4K GitHub stars, Go) is a lightweight server monitoring dashboard using a hub + agent architecture. Install a tiny agent on each server, and the hub collects and displays CPU, RAM, disk, network, and Docker container metrics with clean charts. No Prometheus, no Grafana, no complex setup — just a single binary agent and a web dashboard. Datadog charges per host per month; Beszel monitors unlimited servers for free.

Key Takeaways

• Beszel: MIT, ~4K stars, Go — lightweight monitoring with hub + agent
• Agent-based: Tiny Go binary per server — ~10MB RAM, zero dependencies
• Docker stats: Per-container CPU, memory, and network metrics
• Alerts: Email, webhook, and ntfy notifications for thresholds
• Historical data: Charts with configurable retention
• Multi-server: Monitor all your servers from one dashboard

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Beszel vs Netdata vs Uptime Kuma

Feature	Beszel	Netdata	Uptime Kuma
Focus	Server metrics	Deep system metrics	Uptime/HTTP checks
Agent size	~5MB	~100MB	N/A (agentless)
RAM per agent	~10MB	~200MB	N/A
Docker stats	Yes (per container)	Yes	Docker ping only
Granularity	10s-60s	1s	20s-300s
Setup	Very simple	Moderate	Very simple
Alerting	Email, webhook, ntfy	Email, Slack, PD	90+ channels
Status page	No	No	Yes

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Part 1: Hub Setup (Docker)

# docker-compose.yml (on your monitoring server)
services:
  beszel:
    image: henrygd/beszel:latest
    container_name: beszel
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8090:8090"
    volumes:
      - beszel_data:/beszel_data

volumes:
  beszel_data:

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:8090 → create admin account.

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Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

monitor.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8090
}

---

Part 3: Add Agents

Install agent on each server

Docker agent

# On each monitored server:
services:
  beszel-agent:
    image: henrygd/beszel-agent:latest
    container_name: beszel-agent
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    environment:
      PORT: 45876
      KEY: "${AGENT_KEY}"   # Generated by the hub

Binary agent (no Docker)

# Download and run the agent binary:
curl -sL https://github.com/henrygd/beszel/releases/latest/download/beszel-agent_linux_amd64 \
  -o /usr/local/bin/beszel-agent
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/beszel-agent

# Run:
KEY="your-agent-key" PORT=45876 beszel-agent

Register agent with hub

1. Hub → + Add System
2. Name: prod-server-1
3. Host: 192.168.1.10 (or hostname)
4. Port: 45876
5. → Copy the KEY → set it as KEY env var on the agent
6. Agent connects → data starts flowing

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Part 4: Dashboard

System overview

Each server card shows:

• CPU: Usage percentage with historical chart
• RAM: Used vs total with chart
• Disk: Usage percentage per mount
• Network: Bytes in/out per second
• Uptime: How long the server has been running

Docker container view

Click a server → Containers tab:

• Per-container CPU usage
• Per-container memory usage
• Per-container network I/O
• Container status (running, stopped, etc.)

Charts

• Time range: 1h, 6h, 24h, 7d, 30d
• Granularity: Automatic based on range
• Overlay: Compare metrics across servers

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Part 5: Alerts

Email alerts

Settings → Notifications → Email:
  SMTP Host: mail.yourdomain.com
  SMTP Port: 587
  Username: alerts@yourdomain.com
  Password: ***
  From: alerts@yourdomain.com

Webhook alerts

Settings → Notifications → Webhook:
  URL: https://ntfy.yourdomain.com/server-alerts
  Headers:
    Priority: high
    Tags: computer

Alert rules

Alerts → + Add Alert:
  System: prod-server-1
  Metric: CPU Usage
  Condition: > 90%
  Duration: 5 minutes
  Notification: Email + Webhook

Common alert patterns:

Metric	Threshold	Duration	Severity
CPU	> 90%	5 min	Warning
RAM	> 85%	5 min	Warning
Disk	> 90%	Immediate	Critical
Network	> 100 MB/s	1 min	Info

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Part 6: Multi-Server Setup

Architecture

┌─────────────┐     ┌───────────────┐
│ Beszel Hub  │←────│ Agent: Web    │  (192.168.1.10)
│ (dashboard) │←────│ Agent: DB     │  (192.168.1.11)
│             │←────│ Agent: Media  │  (192.168.1.12)
│             │←────│ Agent: VPS    │  (remote server)
└─────────────┘     └───────────────┘

Remote agents (over internet)

For monitoring remote VPS servers, the agent needs to be reachable from the hub:

Option 1: Open port 45876 on the remote server's firewall Option 2: Use a VPN (WireGuard/Tailscale) for private connectivity Option 3: Reverse tunnel via SSH

# On remote server, create a reverse SSH tunnel:
ssh -R 45876:localhost:45876 user@hub-server -N

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Part 7: Data Retention

Settings → Data:
  Raw data retention: 7 days
  Hourly aggregates: 90 days
  Daily aggregates: 1 year

Beszel stores data efficiently — a server with 10 monitored systems typically uses <500MB of storage after a year.

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Maintenance

# Update hub:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Update agents:
docker pull henrygd/beszel-agent:latest
docker compose up -d beszel-agent
# Or for binary: download latest release and restart

# Backup:
tar -czf beszel-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect beszel_beszel_data --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f beszel

Why Self-Host Beszel?

The case for self-hosting Beszel comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Beszel means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Beszel, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Beszel headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Beszel data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Beszel without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Beszel's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Beszel backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Beszel's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Beszel's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Beszel's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Beszel's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f beszel

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Beszel's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats beszel. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Beszel Updated

Beszel follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Beszel is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

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See also: Uptime Kuma — for HTTP/TCP uptime monitoring and status pages

See all open source monitoring tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/monitoring.