Beszel Hosting

How Beszel works

Beszel separates monitoring into a hub and agents. The hub stores systems, users, dashboards, historical metrics, alerts, and authentication. A lightweight agent runs on each authorised target, collects host and supported container information, and sends it to the hub through the documented connection model. The hosted catalogue entry deploys the hub only; it does not place agents on any other server.

Once an agent is connected, Beszel can show processor, memory, disk, network, temperature, load, filesystem, and supported container statistics, depending on the target and permissions. Alerts can evaluate documented metrics and status conditions. A missing agent, blocked connection, unsupported sensor, or insufficient target permission can leave data absent without implying that the hub itself has failed.

Key Beszel features

Multi-user access lets administrators share selected systems, while histories make trends easier to inspect than point-in-time command output. OAuth and OIDC options can integrate with external identity providers when configured. The catalogue does not supply those providers, target agents, firewall changes, VPN access, or credentials for remote systems.

Beszel is infrastructure monitoring rather than a complete security or application-observability suite. It does not inspect source code, collect every distributed trace, replace central logs, patch a host, manage containers, or provide an on-call response team. Monitoring data should be combined with backups, logs, independent alerts, and operational procedures appropriate to the service.

Beszel vs Datadog

Beszel and Datadog both present infrastructure metrics, history, and alerting. Beszel uses a self-hosted hub with lightweight agents and a focused server dashboard. Datadog is a provider-managed observability platform spanning infrastructure, logs, traces, applications, security, integrations, dashboards, automation, and commercial support.

Datadog may suit organisations that need broad managed telemetry, vendor integrations, enterprise administration, and support. Beszel is more attractive for a smaller environment that wants a focused self-hosted monitor and accepts responsibility for agent installation, network access, target permissions, identity configuration, and incident response.

Who uses Beszel

Homelab users follow several machines from one page, developers watch test or production nodes, and small hosting teams review resource trends for authorised systems. Container statistics can add useful context where agents have the required access and the target runtime is supported.

Beszel is less suitable as the sole source for security detection, billing, compliance evidence, service-level reporting, distributed tracing, or managed remediation. Critical systems should have an independent alert path and a tested process for agent and hub outages.

Self-hosting Beszel: requirements and cost

Beszel hub resource use grows with monitored systems, reporting interval, metric history, container count, alert rules, users, dashboards, API activity, and concurrent sessions. The catalogue provisions no PostgreSQL or MariaDB service and persists /beszel_data. The software itself is free to run; each target still needs an authorised agent and a reachable connection to the hub.

On AvaHost, Beszel uses Plan 1 at €2. The hosted Beszel package includes one-click deployment, a custom domain with automated HTTPS, automatic application updates, and scheduled backups. Target agents, remote installation, firewall or VPN changes, external identity providers, mail alerts, log collection, tracing, security analysis, patching, container control, compliance reporting, and incident staff are not included. Install agents only on systems you administer and test an independent alert path for critical infrastructure.