I have 4 servers. Nothing enterprise-grade - a couple of app servers, a database box, and a staging machine. Datadog was costing me $60/month to show me CPU graphs and disk usage.

That felt wrong.

So I tested alternatives. Grafana + Prometheus was the obvious choice, but the stack itself uses 500MB+ of RAM. On a $4/mo VPS with 2GB total, that's 25% of my resources just for monitoring.

Then I found Beszel. Its agent uses less than 10MB of RAM. The entire monitoring stack - hub and agents across 4 servers - runs on a $3/mo server and barely touches 50MB.

Here's what happened when I switched.

What Beszel Actually Monitors

Beszel tracks the basics well:

CPU usage and load average

Memory and swap usage

Disk usage and I/O

Network throughput

Docker container metrics (CPU/memory per container)

It does NOT do:

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Distributed tracing

Log aggregation

Custom metrics/dashboards beyond server basics

Alerting with complex conditions (basic alerts only)

If you need APM…