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Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He’s covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he’s also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023.

He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn’t exactly go back together afterward. That’s given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he’s gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then.

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It’s no secret that I’ve fallen in love with Proxmox’s versatility. And while I’ve dabbled with other virtualization platforms like Incus, I always seem to come back to my first crush. It’s hard not to get mesmerized by how easy it is to throw up LXC containers, or virtual machines, or whole operating systems when I need them, while running on what seems like a tiny footprint of resources.

I’ve even dabbled with Proxmox Email Gateway to shield a self-hosted email server from spam, which is a special kind of torment that I’d rather leave to the professionals in the future. The Proxmox ecosystem recently added Datacenter Manager, but it’s not quite there for what I need in my home lab as a monitoring and management system.

It’s missing compatibility with notification servers, for a start, so I can’t plug Gotify into it and get pinged whenever something needs my attention. And, while most of my systems are on Proxmox, they’re not the only things in my home lab, and I needed a tool that can monitor thos,e too. What I found is a self-hosted program called Pulse, and this dashing dashboard is just what I was after.

What is Pulse, and why is it useful?

This marvelous monitoring solution works for Proxmox and beyond

One of the most challenging tasks in the home lab is one the datacenter has solved ten thousand times over — how to monitor your infrastructure as it scales up. And it only scales up, as once you’ve got the homelabbing bug, the only limit is your sanity.

To keep the mental strain in check, you need an aerial view of your infrastructure in real time, with the most relevant metrics in full view for decision-making that should be instinctive, not reactive. That’s what Pulse enables, with a modern dashboard that shows metrics, alerts, AI-powered insights, and more across your Proxmox installations, Docker containers, and Kubernetes clusters.

That’s every part of Proxmox, by the way, with Virtual Environment, Email Gateway, and Backup Server all easily viewed and managed via the Proxmox API. It’ll automatically discover nodes on your network, which comes in handy when you’re running HA clusters, and it’s the perfect way to visualize backup jobs as they’re in process.

But you can also install it as a Docker container for a quick dashboard hit on your stack, as a Helm chart, a Home Assistant add-on, or as a systemd service. And it’ll continue to automatically find your services and add them to the dashboard, reducing the admin tasks you need to accomplish so you can focus on what really matters, making and breaking things in your home lab.

It works for more than Proxmox services

While the biggest draw might be monitoring your Proxmox ecosystem, it can also monitor Docker installations, Kubernetes, and systems running Linux, Windows, Synology NAS, and Mac, thanks to the unified agent, which monitors the host and any containers installed on it with a wide range of metrics:

• Host Metrics: CPU, memory, disk, network I/O, temperatures
• Docker/Podman Monitoring: Container metrics, health checks, Swarm support (when enabled)
• Kubernetes Monitoring: Cluster, node, pod, and deployment health (when enabled)
• Auto-Update: Automatically updates when a new version is released
• Multi-Platform: Linux, macOS, Windows

And yes, OCI containers are now supported thanks to Proxmox VE 9.1+.

Pulse

Just seconds to deploy

Then you’ve got all the metrics you could want

Pulse took seconds to connect to my Proxmox VE nodes, thanks to a script that did everything for me. If it failed (which it did the first time), there was also a complete walkthrough of everything the script would have done, so I could manually add things for monitoring. I like that it uses a token for the first login, and keeps credentials encrypted at rest, with API scoping to ensure that it’s coloring between the lines at all times.

You get persistent storage for metrics history, because if it was never logged it never happened, and that way you can check historical trends or expected behavior of operations. The new AI assistant lets you connect to your own AI model for natural language queries about your infrastructure, and the optional Pro subscription adds AI Patrol, which reads the logs and metrics and gives you root causes, predicted time-to-failure, and what you need to do about it to keep things running. Maybe not so necessary if you’re a sysadmin, but for a home lab user, that’s invaluable feedback that could save hours of panicked forum searching.

The built-in alert system can send notifications to Discord, Telegram, Slack, Email, or Teams via Webhooks, or you can link it to other services like the aforementioned Gotify. And those notifications can be triggered by almost anything you can think of, from unusual resource usage to storage thresholds, so you’re on top of things before they become a real issue.

It’s a standout Proxmox VE monitor

Uptime trackers are one thing, but they’re a vanity metric for home lab users, and we should start treating them as such. Without knowing resource utilization, temperatures, and other vital data points, it’s always a game of hide-and-seek whenever a problem arises. Pulse pulls individual metrics for every LXC and VM on my PVE nodes, so I know where to look first.

I’ve used simpler trackers and much more complex ones, and the one thing they all miss is the amount of data presented at one time. Simple ones like Uptime Kuma are good for what they do, while Netdata gives you too much data without any guidelines. Pulse is a good medium ground, with what I want to see at first glance, and more data if I expand a node or service.

I love viewing backups as they happen

Proxmox Backup Server makes handling PVE nodes much less stressful, and being able to monitor that process in Pulse while keeping track of storage usage, backup operation frequency, and snapshot records is a lifesaver.

Not many dashboards I’ve used match the polish of Pulse

There are many dashboards for monitoring your server architecture and services, but very few are this streamlined while still letting you see what’s going on. I’m sure the AI-powered insights will prove to be a dividing factor, but they work, show actionable steps, and connect to your LLM account, whether that’s provided by one of the big names or self-hosted via Ollama. Plus, they’re mostly locked behind the subscription, so you can ignore the AI if you choose.