Monitor Your Server Like a Pro: Beszel & Uptime Kuma Setup on Dokploy

Monitoring your self-hosted infrastructure is non-negotiable. Whether you’re running a simple VPS or a cluster of servers, knowing when a service goes down or when a disk is full is critical. You need visibility into what’s happening inside your servers (resources) AND confirmation that services are accessible from the outside (uptime).

Server monitoring is the systematic process of observing, tracking, and analyzing server performance metrics in real-time. It’s crucial for maintaining system reliability and preventing potential issues before they impact services. Modern server monitoring encompasses:

• Resource utilization: CPU, memory, disk, network
• Application performance: Response times, error rates
• Service availability: Uptime checks, health endpoints
• Container health: Docker container stats and performance

In this guide, we’ll walk through setting up a complete monitoring stack using Dokploy. We’ll deploy Beszel for internal resource monitoring (CPU, memory, disk, Docker stats) and Uptime Kuma for external uptime checks (HTTP/DNS), ensuring you’re covered from all angles.

Understanding Key Monitoring Metrics

Before setting up monitoring tools, it’s essential to understand what metrics matter most:

Essential Server Metrics

Monitoring Priorities by Environment

Different environments require different monitoring focus:

Why Beszel and Uptime Kuma?

Before diving in, let’s understand what each tool brings to the table:

Beszel - The Lightweight Monitoring Hub

Beszel is a modern, lightweight monitoring solution that doesn’t eat up your server’s resources. Unlike heavyweight solutions like Prometheus + Grafana, Beszel uses a single binary agent and provides:

Here’s what the Beszel interface looks like in action:

Beszel provides detailed historical graphs for all your metrics:

Beszel Feature Overview:

Uptime Kuma - The Gold Standard for Uptime Monitoring

Uptime Kuma is the go-to self-hosted uptime monitoring solution. It checks if your websites and services are actually accessible from the outside world and sends notifications if they aren’t.

Why Use Both Together?

The key insight is that internal health ≠ external availability:

• Your server could show 10% CPU usage, but your website might be down due to a misconfigured nginx
• A container might be “running” but returning 502 errors
• Your disk might be 95% full, but Uptime Kuma won’t know until the app crashes

Beszel tells you what’s happening inside. Uptime Kuma tells you what users experience.

How This Stack Compares to Other Solutions

The Importance of Proactive Notifications

A well-configured alerting system should:

1. Provide Early Warning

   • Detect potential issues before they become critical
   • Monitor trend changes that might indicate future problems
   • Alert on unusual patterns or anomalies

2. Enable Quick Response

   • Deliver notifications through multiple channels (email, SMS, Slack)
   • Include relevant diagnostic information
   • Provide clear action items

3. Prevent Alert Fatigue

   • Use intelligent thresholds
   • Implement alert correlation
   • Configure proper alert priorities

Prerequisites

Before starting, ensure you have:

Part 1: Deploying Beszel (The Resource Monitoring Hub)

Beszel consists of two components:

1. The Hub: The main dashboard where you view all metrics
2. The Agent: Installed on every server you want to monitor

Step 1: Create the Beszel Service in Dokploy

1. Go to your Dokploy dashboard and navigate to your project
2. Click Create Service → Template
3. Search for Beszel and select it
4. Choose the server you want to deploy the Hub on
5. Select the latest version tag (e.g., 0.9.1 or latest)

Step 2: Configure the Domain

1. In Dokploy, go to the Domains tab for your new Beszel service
2. Add your domain (e.g., monitor.yourdomain.com)
3. Set the port to 8090 (Beszel’s default UI port)
4. Enable HTTPS (Let’s Encrypt)
5. Click Create

If using Cloudflare:

• Create an A Record pointing monitor to your server IP
• Set SSL/TLS mode to Full (not Flexible)

Step 3: Set Essential Environment Variables

To ensure email alerts contain the correct links (instead of localhost), you must set the application URL.

1. Go to the Environment tab in Dokploy
2. Add the following variable:

APP_URL=https://monitor.yourdomain.com

3. Click Save and Redeploy

Step 4: Initial Beszel Setup

1. Visit your new URL (https://monitor.yourdomain.com)
2. Create your admin account with a strong password
3. You’ll land on the main dashboard (empty for now)

Best Practices for Beszel Deployment:

• Use secure networking between server and agents
• Implement proper backup for Beszel data
• Regular updates of both server and agent containers
• Monitor agent connectivity from the Hub

Part 2: Installing the Beszel Agent

Now that the Hub is running, we need to install the Agent on every server we want to monitor.

Step 1: Get the Agent Configuration from the Hub

1. In the Beszel Hub, click Add System
2. Name your system (e.g., main-dokploy-node or production-1)
3. Copy the Docker Compose snippet provided - it contains your unique public KEY for authentication

The snippet will look something like this:

services:
  beszel-agent:
    image: henrygd/beszel-agent
    container_name: beszel-agent
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    environment:
      PORT: 45876
      KEY: 'ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIHiPxG...'

Step 2: Deploy the Agent via Dokploy

1. Go back to Dokploy on the server you want to monitor
2. Create a new Compose service (not a template)
3. Name it beszel-agent
4. Paste the Docker Compose configuration you copied from the Hub
5. Click Deploy

Step 3: Verify the Connection

Once deployed:

• The icon in your Beszel Hub should turn green
• You’ll start seeing real-time CPU, Memory, Disk, and Docker container stats
• Historical graphs will begin populating

What Metrics You’ll See:

Monitoring Additional Servers

Repeat the agent installation process for each server you want to monitor:

1. In the Hub, click Add System for each new server
2. Give it a unique name
3. Copy the Docker Compose snippet (each will have a unique KEY)
4. Deploy the agent on that server

Part 3: Setting Up Uptime Kuma

While Beszel watches internal resources, Uptime Kuma watches external availability.

Step 1: Deploy via Dokploy Template

1. In Dokploy, create a new service from Template
2. Search for Uptime Kuma and select it
3. Check the image tag - change to the latest stable version if needed (e.g., 1 or specific version like 1.23.15)
4. Click Deploy

Step 2: Configure the Domain

1. Go to the Domains tab
2. Set up a domain (e.g., status.yourdomain.com)
3. The internal port should be 3001
4. Enable HTTPS
5. Click Create

Step 3: Initial Uptime Kuma Setup

1. Visit your new URL (https://status.yourdomain.com)
2. Create your admin account
3. You’ll see an empty dashboard ready for monitors

Step 4: Add Your First Monitor

1. Click Add New Monitor
2. Choose monitor type: HTTP(s) for websites
3. Enter the URL you want to monitor
4. Set the heartbeat interval (e.g., 60 seconds)
5. Click Save

Recommended monitors to set up:

Part 4: Configuring SMTP Alerts with Brevo

Monitoring is useless if you don’t get notified when things break. Here’s how to set up email alerts using Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), which offers 300 free emails per day.

Step 1: Get SMTP Details from Brevo

1. Create a free Brevo account if you don’t have one
2. Go to Settings → SMTP & API
3. Generate a new SMTP Key
4. Note down your credentials:

Step 2: Configure Beszel Alerts

1. In Beszel, go to Settings → SMTP (or General settings depending on version)
2. Enter the SMTP details:
   • Host: smtp-relay.brevo.com
   • Port: 587
   • Username: Your Brevo email
   • Password: Your SMTP Key
   • Sender Address: [email protected]
3. Save the settings

Set up alert thresholds:

1. Go to Systems → click your server → Alerts
2. Enable alerts for specific thresholds:

Step 3: Configure Uptime Kuma Alerts

1. In Uptime Kuma, go to Settings → Notifications
2. Click Setup Notification
3. Choose Email (SMTP)
4. Fill in the same Brevo details:
   • Hostname: smtp-relay.brevo.com
   • Port: 587
   • Security: STARTTLS
   • Username: Your Brevo email
   • Password: Your SMTP Key
   • From Email: [email protected]
   • To Email: Your notification email
5. Click Test to verify it works
6. Save the notification

Attach notifications to monitors:

When creating or editing a monitor, scroll down to Notifications and select your email notification to receive alerts for that specific monitor.

Part 5: Testing Your Monitoring Stack

Always verify everything works before assuming you’re covered.

Test Beszel Alerts

1. SSH into your monitored server
2. Stop the Beszel Agent container:

   docker stop beszel-agent

3. Wait 1-2 minutes
4. You should receive an email saying “System is Down”
5. Restart the agent:

   docker start beszel-agent

6. You should receive a “System is Up” email

Test Uptime Kuma Alerts

1. Stop one of your monitored web applications:

   docker stop your-web-app

2. Uptime Kuma should detect the error (502/Timeout) within your heartbeat interval
3. You should receive a notification email
4. Restart your app and verify you get an “Up” notification

Advanced Configuration

Creating Status Pages with Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma can generate public status pages to share with your users:

1. Go to Status Pages in the menu
2. Click New Status Page
3. Give it a name and slug (e.g., status)
4. Add monitors to display
5. Customize the look and feel
6. Share the public URL with users

Monitoring Docker Containers Directly

Uptime Kuma can monitor Docker containers without going through HTTP:

1. Create a new monitor with type Docker Container
2. Enter the container name or ID
3. The monitor checks if the container is running (not just the port)

volumes:
  - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

Monitoring Multiple Servers

For a multi-server setup:

1. Deploy one Beszel Hub (central dashboard)
2. Deploy Beszel Agents on each server (using unique keys)
3. Deploy one Uptime Kuma instance (can monitor all external endpoints)
4. Configure alerts to go to the same email/Slack/Discord channel

Best Practices

Recommended Alert Thresholds

Based on real-world experience, here are suggested thresholds for common metrics:

When to Scale Up Your Monitoring

Consider moving to more robust solutions when:

1. Small deployments (1-5 servers): Beszel + Uptime Kuma is perfect
2. Medium deployments (5-20 servers): Consider adding Netdata for deeper insights
3. Large deployments (20+ servers): Evaluate Prometheus/Grafana for enterprise features

Conclusion

By combining Beszel for internal resource metrics and Uptime Kuma for external uptime checks, you now have a robust, self-hosted monitoring stack running entirely on Dokploy. This setup is:

• Lightweight: Minimal resource usage compared to Prometheus/Grafana
• Cost-effective: Completely free to self-host
• Comprehensive: Covers both internal health and external availability
• Alert-ready: You’ll be the first to know when something breaks

Your monitoring stack now provides visibility into:

• Server resources (CPU, memory, disk, network)
• Docker container health and statistics
• Website and API availability
• SSL certificate expiration
• And much more

Choosing the Right Tool for Your Needs

Summary of Best Practices:

• Start with basic monitoring and expand as needed
• Implement proper alerting with meaningful thresholds
• Regular backup of monitoring data
• Keep monitoring tools updated
• Document monitoring setup and procedures

For more advanced monitoring scenarios or to explore other tools like Netdata or Prometheus, check out our comprehensive Server Monitoring Guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

docker run --rm -v uptime-kuma_data:/data -v $(pwd):/backup alpine tar cvf /backup/kuma-backup.tar /data

volumes:
  - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
  - /mnt/disk/.beszel:/extra-filesystems/sda1:ro