Best Self-Hosted Monitoring Tools in 2026

Quick Picks

Use Case	Best Choice	Why
Best full monitoring stack	Grafana + Prometheus	Industry standard. Prometheus collects, Grafana visualizes. Thousands of community dashboards.
Best uptime monitoring	Uptime Kuma	Simple, beautiful, fast setup. Monitors HTTP, TCP, DNS, ping. Notification integrations.
Best all-in-one	Netdata	Zero-config monitoring with 800+ integrations. Real-time dashboards out of the box.
Best for enterprises	Zabbix	Scales to thousands of hosts. SNMP, IPMI, JMX. Template-based monitoring.

The Full Ranking

1. Grafana + Prometheus — Best Full Monitoring Stack

Grafana and Prometheus together form the dominant monitoring stack in the self-hosting world. Prometheus scrapes metrics from your services at configurable intervals and stores them in a time-series database. Grafana connects to Prometheus (and dozens of other data sources) to build dashboards.

This combination is the industry standard for a reason: it’s flexible, battle-tested, and has the largest ecosystem of exporters, dashboards, and integrations.

Pros:

• Industry standard — massive community, thousands of pre-built dashboards
• Prometheus handles any scale (used by Kubernetes, cloud-native stacks)
• Grafana supports 50+ data sources beyond Prometheus
• Alerting built into both Grafana and Prometheus (Alertmanager)
• PromQL query language is powerful once learned
• Both are lightweight individually (~200-300 MB RAM each)

Cons:

• Two separate services to manage (plus exporters)
• PromQL has a learning curve
• Prometheus is pull-based — requires configuring scrape targets
• No built-in node/exporter setup (you add exporters per service)
• Grafana dashboard creation takes time (or use community dashboards)

Best for: Anyone serious about monitoring. Home labs with multiple services, production environments, anyone who wants professional-grade observability.

Read our full Grafana guide | Read our full Prometheus guide

2. Uptime Kuma — Best Uptime Monitor

Uptime Kuma does one thing extremely well: monitoring whether your services are up. Clean UI, easy setup, supports HTTP(S), TCP, HTTP keyword, DNS, ping, gRPC, and Docker container monitoring. Notifications via 90+ integrations (Telegram, Discord, Slack, email, webhooks).

Pros:

• Beautiful, intuitive web UI
• Single container, ~150 MB RAM
• 90+ notification integrations
• Status pages for public-facing uptime dashboards
• Maintenance windows
• Multi-language support
• Active development with frequent releases

Cons:

• Uptime monitoring only — no system metrics (CPU, RAM, disk)
• No metric collection or graphing
• SQLite backend limits scalability for very large deployments
• No API for programmatic configuration (web UI only)

Best for: Anyone who needs to know when services go down. Perfect complement to Grafana/Prometheus — Uptime Kuma monitors availability, Grafana monitors performance.

Read our full guide: How to Self-Host Uptime Kuma

3. Netdata — Best All-in-One Monitor

Netdata gives you real-time monitoring with zero configuration. Install it, and it immediately starts collecting 2,000+ metrics per second from your system. The built-in dashboard is beautiful and responsive. 800+ integrations detect and monitor services automatically.

Pros:

• Zero-config — auto-discovers services and starts monitoring
• Real-time (1-second granularity by default)
• 800+ integrations out of the box
• Beautiful built-in dashboard (no Grafana needed)
• Low resource usage for what it does (~100-200 MB RAM)
• Anomaly detection via machine learning
• Health monitoring with built-in alert templates

Cons:

• Requires network_mode: host and elevated privileges for full monitoring
• Long-term storage requires Netdata Cloud or external DB (Prometheus, InfluxDB)
• Default data retention is limited (recent data only)
• Netdata Cloud features require a free account (optional but pushed)
• Less customizable than Grafana for dashboard creation

Best for: Quick deployment where you want instant visibility into system health. Excellent for home servers and small setups where you don’t want to configure Prometheus exporters.

4. Zabbix — Best for Large-Scale Enterprise Monitoring

Zabbix is enterprise-grade monitoring that scales to thousands of hosts. SNMP, IPMI, JMX, and custom agent-based monitoring. Template-based configuration makes it easy to add new hosts with standard monitoring. The web UI is comprehensive (if dated).

Pros:

• Scales to 10,000+ hosts
• SNMP v1/v2c/v3 support (network devices, printers, UPS)
• IPMI for hardware monitoring (temperatures, fan speeds)
• Template system — add a host and assign a template
• Auto-discovery of network devices
• Distributed monitoring with proxies
• Mature (20+ years of development)

Cons:

• Complex setup (server, database, web frontend, agents)
• Web UI feels dated compared to Grafana or Netdata
• Higher resource requirements (PostgreSQL + Java for JMX)
• Steep learning curve for configuration
• Overkill for home labs with a few hosts

Best for: Users monitoring network infrastructure (routers, switches, NAS, UPS) via SNMP. Not recommended for simple home lab setups — use Netdata or Grafana/Prometheus instead.

5. Beszel — Lightweight Docker Monitoring

Beszel is a newer, lightweight monitoring tool specifically designed for Docker environments. It monitors container resource usage (CPU, RAM, network, disk I/O) with a clean, modern web UI. Minimal resource footprint.

Pros:

• Purpose-built for Docker container monitoring
• Extremely lightweight (~50 MB RAM)
• Modern, clean UI
• Simple setup (single binary + Docker socket)
• Real-time container stats

Cons:

• Docker-only — no system-level monitoring
• Smaller community and ecosystem
• Fewer alerting integrations
• Limited long-term data retention
• Newer project — less battle-tested

Best for: Users who primarily want to monitor their Docker containers without the overhead of a full monitoring stack.

Full Comparison Table

Feature	Grafana + Prometheus	Uptime Kuma	Netdata	Zabbix	Beszel
Monitoring type	Metrics + alerting	Uptime only	Metrics + alerting	Full stack	Container metrics
Setup complexity	Medium	Easy	Easy	Hard	Easy
RAM usage	~500 MB (both)	~150 MB	~200 MB	~1 GB+	~50 MB
Containers needed	2+	1	1	3+	1
Custom dashboards	Yes (best-in-class)	No	Limited	Yes	No
SNMP support	Via exporter	No	Yes	Yes (native)	No
Notification integrations	Many	90+	Many	Many	Limited
Long-term storage	Yes	No	External DB needed	Yes	Limited
Auto-discovery	No	No	Yes	Yes	Docker only
Community size	Very large	Large	Large	Very large	Small
Real-time (1s)	Configurable	No (intervals)	Yes	No	Yes
Learning curve	Medium	Low	Low	High	Low
License	AGPL-3.0 / Apache-2.0	MIT	GPL-3.0	GPL-2.0	MIT

Recommended Stack Combinations

Home lab (5-15 services): Uptime Kuma + Netdata. Uptime Kuma monitors availability and sends alerts. Netdata provides real-time system dashboards. Total RAM: ~350 MB.

Serious home lab (15+ services): Grafana + Prometheus + Uptime Kuma. Prometheus collects detailed metrics. Grafana builds custom dashboards. Uptime Kuma handles uptime alerts. Total RAM: ~650 MB.

Production/enterprise: Grafana + Prometheus + Zabbix (for SNMP devices) + Uptime Kuma (for public-facing status pages).

How We Evaluated

We evaluated each tool on: ease of setup, out-of-box value, customizability, alerting capabilities, resource usage, community size, and long-term data storage. Grafana + Prometheus ranks #1 because no other combination offers the same depth of customization and ecosystem support. Uptime Kuma ranks #2 because uptime monitoring is the most common need and it does it perfectly.

Related

• How to Self-Host Grafana
• How to Self-Host Prometheus
• How to Self-Host Uptime Kuma
• Replace Datadog
• Replace UptimeRobot
• Replace New Relic
• Replace Pingdom
• Docker Compose Basics
• Reverse Proxy Setup
• Backup Strategy