Grafana vs Beszel: Which Monitoring Tool?
Full Observability Stack vs Focused System Monitor
Grafana is a visualization and dashboarding platform that connects to dozens of data sources (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, MySQL, and more) to create custom monitoring dashboards. It’s the industry standard for observability — used by companies like GitLab, DigitalOcean, and Wikimedia.
Beszel is a lightweight system monitoring tool purpose-built for tracking CPU, RAM, disk, network, and temperature across multiple servers. No plugins, no data source configuration, no dashboard building — install the agent on a server and metrics appear automatically.
They exist at different ends of the complexity spectrum. The question isn’t “which is better?” — it’s “how much monitoring do you actually need?”
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Grafana (+Prometheus) | Beszel |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | General-purpose observability | System resource monitoring |
| Setup time | 30-60 min (Grafana + data source) | 5 min (hub + agent) |
| Custom dashboards | Unlimited (the whole point) | Fixed dashboard |
| Data sources | 100+ (Prometheus, InfluxDB, etc.) | Built-in only |
| Application metrics | Yes (with exporters) | No |
| Log aggregation | Yes (Loki) | No |
| Alerting | Yes (multi-channel) | Basic (email, webhooks) |
| Multi-server | Yes (scrape targets) | Yes (agent per server) |
| Pre-built dashboards | 20,000+ community dashboards | N/A (built-in views) |
| API | Full REST + query API | Basic |
| RAM usage | 200-500MB (Grafana + Prometheus) | Hub: ~30MB, Agent: ~10MB |
| Learning curve | Steep (PromQL, dashboard design) | None |
| Language | Go (Grafana), Go (Prometheus) | Go |
The Setup Gap
Grafana doesn’t monitor anything by itself. It visualizes data from other sources. A typical monitoring stack:
- Prometheus — scrapes and stores metrics (requires configuration of scrape targets)
- Node Exporter — exposes system metrics for Prometheus to scrape (install on each server)
- Grafana — visualizes Prometheus data (import dashboards, configure data sources)
- Optionally: Alertmanager for alert routing, Loki for logs, cAdvisor for container metrics
That’s 3-5 containers just for basic system monitoring, each with its own configuration. Powerful, but a lot of moving parts.
Beszel is two components:
- Hub — web UI and data storage (one container)
- Agent — system metrics collector (one binary or container per server)
Install both, add your server’s SSH key to the hub, and metrics appear. No query language, no dashboard configuration, no exporter setup.
When Grafana Makes Sense
Grafana earns its complexity when you need:
- Application-level metrics. Monitoring Postgres query latency, Nginx request rates, or custom application metrics. Beszel only sees system resources, not what’s happening inside your applications.
- Custom dashboards for specific workloads. A Jellyfin dashboard showing transcodes, streams, and library size. A Pi-hole dashboard showing queries, blocked domains, and top clients. Grafana’s community has pre-built dashboards for nearly every self-hosted application.
- Correlation across data types. Overlaying CPU usage with Nginx error rates to find the cause of a traffic spike. Grafana’s query language lets you combine metrics from different sources on the same graph.
- Long-term trend analysis. Prometheus stores weeks or months of high-resolution metrics. Grafana’s time-range controls and aggregation functions let you analyze trends over any period.
- Professional or team environments. Grafana supports organizations, teams, RBAC, and embedding. If you need to share monitoring with colleagues or customers, Grafana is built for it.
When Beszel Makes Sense
Beszel is the right choice when:
- You just want to see server health. CPU, RAM, disk, network, temperature — across all your servers in one view. No configuration, no dashboards to build, no query language to learn.
- You’re monitoring 1-5 home servers. The full Grafana stack is overkill for a homelab. Beszel gives you server health monitoring with 40MB total RAM usage versus 400MB+.
- You want zero maintenance. Beszel’s agent updates independently, the hub stores its own data, and there are no external dependencies. No Prometheus retention policies to tune, no disk usage from time-series data to manage.
- You’re already using Uptime Kuma for availability. Beszel complements Uptime Kuma by adding resource metrics. Together they cover availability + system health without Grafana’s complexity.
Resource Usage
| Component | RAM | Disk |
|---|---|---|
| Grafana | ~150-250MB | ~100MB + dashboards |
| Prometheus (1 week retention) | ~200-500MB | 1-5GB |
| Node Exporter (per server) | ~20MB | ~15MB |
| Grafana stack total | ~400-750MB | ~1-5GB |
| Beszel Hub | ~30MB | ~20MB + data |
| Beszel Agent (per server) | ~10MB | ~15MB |
| Beszel total | ~40MB | ~35MB |
On a 2GB VPS running multiple services, Grafana+Prometheus consume 20-35% of available RAM for monitoring alone. Beszel consumes 2%.
Use Cases Side by Side
| Scenario | Grafana | Beszel |
|---|---|---|
| ”Is my server out of disk space?” | Works (requires setup) | Works (immediate) |
| “Why is Nextcloud slow?” | Excellent (app-level metrics) | Can show CPU/RAM spike but not root cause |
| ”Show me network throughput by container” | Yes (cAdvisor + dashboard) | No (system-level only) |
| “Dashboard for my homelab to show visitors” | Beautiful custom dashboards | Basic built-in UI |
| ”Monitor 3 Raspberry Pis” | Overkill | Perfect fit |
| ”Monitor a production Kubernetes cluster” | Industry standard | Not designed for this |
Final Verdict
If you’re running a homelab with 1-5 servers and want system health visibility, use Beszel. It gives you 80% of what you’d get from a Grafana stack with 5% of the setup effort and 10% of the resource usage. You can always migrate to Grafana later if you outgrow it.
If you need application-level monitoring, custom dashboards, or team features, use Grafana. Nothing else in the self-hosted world matches its flexibility and ecosystem. Accept the setup cost — it pays off once you have dashboards tailored to your specific stack.
Many experienced self-hosters run both: Beszel for lightweight system monitoring on all servers, and Grafana for deep-dive dashboards on specific workloads that need application-level visibility.
FAQ
Can Beszel replace Prometheus + Grafana entirely?
Only if you exclusively need system-level metrics (CPU, RAM, disk, network). If you need application metrics, log aggregation, or custom visualizations, you need Grafana. Beszel doesn’t collect application-level data.
Can I feed Beszel data into Grafana?
Not directly — Beszel doesn’t expose a Prometheus-compatible endpoint. If you want system metrics in Grafana, use Node Exporter + Prometheus instead of Beszel. Running both Beszel and Grafana for system metrics is redundant.
Is there a middle ground between Grafana and Beszel?
Netdata sits between them — more detailed than Beszel (per-process metrics, container metrics) but simpler than Grafana (zero-config, built-in dashboards). It uses more resources than Beszel (~100-200MB) but less than a full Grafana stack.
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