I’m also looking for something. I just tried netdata but looks like there is a 5 node limit now? I’m green on netdata but seems like a lot of people are mad about it lol. I’ll give beszel a try but doesn’t look like it does logs? Any thoughts on Foss options for system logs and alerting as well?

Zabbix is extremly nice.

Why?

• API Monitoring for Proxmox and Docker/Podman. Aka "you don’t need to setup monitoring for every container/LxC/VM. Do it once for the host,then everything gets autodiscovered.

• Active and passive agents as well as SNMP, IPMI,etc. can be combined as you like. Also does Website/service/application/database monitoring, SSG/Telnet checks and nowadys can even do Prometheus and MQTT/Modbus

• The proxy is really really worth it. It collects data from nodes you do not want exposed and relays them to the server. This includes all kind of inputs and is really easy to setup.

• Due to it being around for two decades there are a shitton of templares for devices - and it’s fairly easy to do your own.

• Unlike other systems (cough checkmk cough Grafana) there are no features that are only available to paying customers.

The most major downsides are the fact that it’s moderately to fairly ressource intensive to run in a small setup(but does consume less than others in large Setups) and it’s far less flashy dashboards. (Which are still powerful,though)

I’ve recently switched to Beszel and so far it’s been great.

Since I didn’t see it mentioned there’s also Gatus.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

[Thread #76 for this comm, first seen 9th Feb 2026, 01:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I know these projects cockpit, netdata and grafana + prometheus.

I’m using CheckMK to monitor my hypervisor, physical hardware like disks, CPU etc. and SNMP-capable hardware like my pfSense firewall via a CheckMK instance in docker. It either works in docker or on a few different linux based OS like ubuntu and debian (see CheckMK download page).

There’s a free and open source version (called raw edition, GitHub Link) which I am using. It comes with a lot of checks / plugins for monitoring stuff out of the box and if there’s something it doesn’t ship, you can easily create your own check in whatever language your server is capable of executing a binary of. Or you could look up if there’s a user-contributed plugin on the official CheckMK Exchange Platform.

The whole configuration of this is based on rules with a lot of predefined rules and sane defaults already set.

To have an example for your use-case: You can monitor docker-logfiles and let CheckMK warn you, if specific keywords are or are not in a logfile. You will then be able to view the offending lines in the monitoring UI.

Why do I use this?

• We use it at work
• FOSS
• docker makes updating this easy
• can send mails, teams notifications, …
• very customizable and expandable

my docker compose file

# docker-compose.yml

services:
  monitoring:
    image: checkmk/check-mk-raw:2.4.0-latest
    container_name: monitoring
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - CMK_PASSWORD=changeme
    ports:
      # WEB UI port
      - "5000:5000"
      # agent communication port
      - "8000:8000"
      # used for SNMP
      - "162:162/udp"
      - "514:514/tcp"
      - "514:514/udp"
    volumes:
      - "./monitoring:/omd/sites"
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    env_file:
      - .env

It’s not primarily made for monitoring, but Dockhand has a lot of great monitoring for your whole host and for individual containers.

Start off simple, use something like uptime-kuma just to check your services are available - takes minutes to set up and can send you notifications when something goes down. It can plug into docker directly to check if a container is up, as well as perform HTTP checks that the service is responding, plus some other cool stuff.

(Side note, I set up ntfy to handle notifications and it’s great! Another solid recommendation but you can use discord web hooks or whatever as well)

The other options described here are good for gathering and visualising data, but it takes quite a bit to set them up and even more to configure the right kinds of alerts to notify you when something is wrong. A simple “is this docker container running” check or a “does this respond with a http 200” check gets you like 95% the way there.