beszel-check_skill

Overview

This skill monitors home lab servers using Beszel (a PocketBase-based service) to give a quick operational view of systems and containers. It exposes simple CLI commands to fetch overall system health and to list the top containers by CPU usage. Designed for home lab and small infrastructure owners who want a lightweight, local monitoring tool. Outputs are compact so they integrate easily into scripts or status dashboards.

How this skill works

The skill queries Beszel endpoints to collect status metrics from registered hosts and containers, then summarizes the results on the command line. Two primary commands are provided: one for an overall status summary of all systems, and one for listing top containers by CPU usage. Commands are designed to be invoked from a shell environment and return plain-text summaries that can be piped into other tools or used in automation.

When to use it

• Quickly check overall health of all home lab servers from a terminal.
• Identify which containers are consuming the most CPU during troubleshooting.
• Integrate short status checks into cron jobs, shell prompts, or chatops.
• Monitor systems without deploying heavyweight monitoring stacks.

Best practices

• Run commands from a shell that has your environment loaded (e.g., source ~/.zshrc).
• Use the overall status command regularly to catch degraded services early.
• Combine the containers output with alerts or scripts to restart troublesome containers automatically.
• Keep Beszel/PocketBase access restricted to your local network or VPN for security.
• Log or pipe outputs to files if you need historical context for incidents.

Example use cases

• Daily morning check: run the status command to confirm backups and key services are healthy.
• During a spike: run the containers command to see which container needs scaling or investigation.
• Automation: add status checks to a cron job and notify you if any service becomes unhealthy.
• Integration: feed the plain-text outputs into a lightweight dashboard or chat bot for team visibility.