Prometheus is brilliant. For watching a few VPSes, it's too much.

Where Prometheus earns its reputation, and when a hosted one-command monitor is the better fit for a few VPSes.

PulseNode · updated July 2026

If you run a handful of VPSes (an app server or two, a database box, a worker), you have probably been told the proper way to monitor them is Prometheus and Grafana. The advice is sound. It just assumes you want to operate a monitoring system, not glance at one.

This page is for the indie dev or small agency weighing a Prometheus alternative for VPS monitoring. For a small fleet, a Prometheus + Grafana + exporters + Alertmanager stack is a second system to operate on top of the servers you were trying to watch. PulseNode does the part you probably came for (host metrics, Docker, open ports, external checks, alerts) in one command, hosted.

Up front: PulseNode is a young, hosted, paid product run by one founder. It is not open source, you can't self-host it, and it is not a like-for-like replacement. Where Prometheus is the better choice, this page says so.

Why people go looking for a Prometheus alternative for VPS monitoring

Prometheus costs nothing to download. The bill shows up as the system you assemble around it and then keep running. That is not a knock on Prometheus; it is what a flexible, self-hosted, pull-based platform asks of you.

1. Exporters and scrape YAML

Prometheus collects metrics by pulling: it scrapes an HTTP /metrics endpoint on each target. (prometheus.io) A bare server knows nothing about your host, so you install node_exporter on every VPS. It listens on port 9100 by default, without authentication or TLS, unless you add a firewall, reverse proxy, or mTLS yourself. (github.com/prometheus/node_exporter, betterstack.com)

Docker container metrics need yet another component, typically cAdvisor. (signoz.io) Every target then goes into prometheus.yml under scrape_configs and has to be kept in sync as servers come and go.

2. Storage, retention, and upgrades

Prometheus stores samples in a local time-series database and keeps 15 days of data if you never set a retention flag. (prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage) Longer history means growing local disk, or remote write to an external store like Thanos or Mimir: one more system to run. (prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage) Add Grafana for dashboards, and the Prometheus server itself needs patching too.

3. Alertmanager

Prometheus evaluates alerting rules; delivery belongs to Alertmanager, a separate component that handles "deduplicating, grouping, and routing them to the correct receiver integration such as email, PagerDuty, or OpsGenie," plus silencing and inhibition. (prometheus.io/docs/alerting) That is one more service to deploy, configure in YAML, and keep alive, and if it is down, nobody gets paged.

The full bill for free monitoring: a Prometheus server, an exporter on every box, cAdvisor, Grafana, Alertmanager, and remote storage if you want real history. At platform scale it earns its keep. For three VPSes it is a lot of moving parts to babysit.

Side-by-side comparison

Sources for the Prometheus column: architecture & pull model, node_exporter port 9100, 15-day default retention & remote write, Alertmanager responsibilities.

Where Prometheus wins (and you should use it)

Prometheus is the industry standard for real reasons, none of which PulseNode tries to replace:

• PromQL. A query language for slicing multi-dimensional time series: rates, quantiles, aggregations, math across metrics. PulseNode has nothing like it. (prometheus.io)
• Custom application metrics. Instrument your own code, expose a /metrics endpoint, and Prometheus scrapes it: request rates, queue depths, whatever you can count. PulseNode is not an instrumentation framework.
• The exporter ecosystem. Hundreds exist for databases, proxies, and message queues; if a thing has an exporter, Prometheus can watch it.
• Retention and scale. With remote write to Thanos, Mimir, and friends, Prometheus handles enormous, long-retention, high-cardinality deployments. (prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage)
• Data ownership. It runs entirely on your own infrastructure, so your data never leaves. If that is a hard requirement, a hosted product is the wrong choice. (prometheus.io)
• Kubernetes. Service discovery and the Prometheus Operator make it the default in k8s environments.

If you need any of these, use Prometheus.

Where PulseNode wins for a small fleet

Most of that capability sits unused on a small fleet while the operational cost stays real. PulseNode makes the opposite trade. You paste one install line per server and the machine shows up on your dashboard. There is no scrape config to write and no Grafana or Alertmanager to stand up; the dashboard side is ours to run.

The agent is a single static Go binary running as a hardened systemd service. It pushes metrics out over HTTPS and never listens on a port, so there is no 9100 to firewall and nothing inbound to allow, and we get no SSH access to your machines. Linux, amd64 and arm64.

Out of the box it covers per-core CPU and load average, RAM and swap, disk per mount, network per interface, and uptime, plus Docker containers (status, image, uptime) and open TCP/UDP ports with the owning process name. External HTTP(S) checks with latency and TLS-expiry are included too. Charts update live over SSE.

Alerts are plain thresholds you set in the dashboard: cpu > 85%, ram > 90%, that kind of thing. Disk rules watch whichever mount is fullest. Each rule has a cooldown, a recovery notice fires when the value drops back, and a separate alert covers an agent going silent. Everything lands in Telegram and email; there is no PromQL and no separate alerting daemon.

What PulseNode does not do

The fair objections:

• No PromQL, custom dashboards, or metric math. You get a fixed set of host charts (1h / 6h / 24h / 7d, plus 14d and 30d on Pro).
• No custom application metrics, exporters, or instrumentation. It watches the host, Docker, and ports; it won't scrape your app's /metrics.
• No APM, logs, traces, RUM, or synthetics. It monitors infrastructure and stops there.
• Short retention: 7 days on Hobby, 30 on Pro. Not years.
• Linux only, with a push interval of about 30 seconds, not sub-second scraping.
• Hosted only. Your metric data lives on our servers. If self-hosting is a requirement, that settles it: Prometheus.
• Young and solo. PulseNode is a founder-run beta: stable core, real production servers on it around the clock, but expect rough edges and fast fixes.

If any of those are dealbreakers, keep Prometheus.

"But I could just run node_exporter"

You could, and for a single box you check by hand it's fine. On its own, though, node_exporter gives you a raw /metrics page on port 9100: no UI or history behind it, no alerting, nothing that knows about Docker or which process owns a port. (github.com/prometheus/node_exporter)

Turning that page into monitoring still takes a Prometheus server to scrape and store it, Grafana to draw it, and Alertmanager to page you: the whole stack from the section above. And you have exposed an unauthenticated metrics port on every server, yours to firewall or wrap in TLS. (betterstack.com)

PulseNode's agent is the opposite shape. It pushes outbound to a dashboard that already handles storage, charts, and alerts, so nothing on your server listens and nothing needs assembling.

Pricing

Two plans. Billing runs through Lemon Squeezy, VAT is handled at checkout, and you can cancel anytime.

• Hobby, €5/mo: up to 5 servers, 7-day history, live dashboard and charts, alert rules to Telegram and email, external HTTP(S) and TLS-expiry checks. Get Hobby
• Pro, €15/mo: up to 20 servers and 30-day history; otherwise the same product. Get Pro

Support on both plans is email, answered by the founder; there is no support team. Prometheus is free software: you pay in servers, storage, and hours. Whether €5 a month beats those hours is arithmetic you can do yourself.

See also

• PulseNode vs Beszel →
• PulseNode vs Netdata →
• PulseNode vs Zabbix →
• All comparisons →
• Docs →