Why I use Beszel for monitoring my Homelab
When it comes to Homelab tinkering and DevOps projects, monitoring is a must — but I’ve don’t want to spend hours setting up/maintaining tools just to know if a VM or container is online. After testing solutions like Grafana/Prometheus or Glances, Beszel has become my favorite lightweight option. It’s simple, fast to deploy, and does exactly what I need without the overhead.
I run it on Unraid as a Docker container, with agents installed both on Unraid itself and my Home Assistant VM. That’s all I need to monitor the core parts of my homelab.
What is Beszel?
Beszel is a minimal, no-nonsense service checker. It pings your defined endpoints and returns a JSON API with simple health statuses: up, down, or timeout. You can optionally install agents to collect system metrics like CPU and RAM, but even without them, it’s incredibly useful.
It doesn’t require a database or complex stack — just a config file and a container, and you’re good to go.
My Setup
It’s actually stupid easy.
- Set up Beszel Hub running as a Docker container on Unraid
- Set up Beszel Agent running as a Docker container on Unraid/Home Assistant
- That’s it. No config needed, pulled all my container info right away
There is the option to configure stuff manually, but I did not need to at all. Here is the generated config.yaml that Beszel exported for me.
systems:
- name: homeassistant
host: homeassistant.bndct.dev
port: 45876
users:
- [email protected]
- name: unraid
host: unraid.bndct.dev
port: 45876
users:
- [email protected]
Integration with Homepage
One of my favorite features of Beszel is how easy it is to plug into Homepage. I use this every day — it’s the first thing I check to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Final Thoughts
Beszel might not be as fancy as something like Prometheus/Grafana, but that’s why I use it. It’s lightweight, fast to set up, and does the job. For my homelab, that’s a win.