Pulse
Pulse is a self-hosted dashboard and alerting tool for your homelab or
infrastructure. Point it at Proxmox, Docker, Kubernetes, TrueNAS, vSphere or
your own Linux, Windows and macOS machines, and it shows their health in one
place, keeps the history, and tells you when something needs attention: a
failed backup, a filling disk, an unhealthy container, a node that dropped
offline.
Want to look around first? The live demo runs on
sample data and signs you in automatically.
What Pulse does
- Gives each platform its own page. Proxmox, Docker, Kubernetes, TrueNAS,
vSphere and machines each get a view that matches how you already think
about them, with storage and backups beside the systems they belong to.
- Alerts you when it matters. Set thresholds for CPU, memory, disk,
temperature and more, and get notified by email or through Discord, Slack,
Teams, Telegram, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, PagerDuty or any webhook.
- Checks the things that can’t run an agent. Ping, TCP, UDP and HTTP(S)
availability checks cover routers, printers and web services, with
certificate-expiry warnings.
- Keeps history. Every guest, container and host has charts: seven days in
Community, ninety in Pro.
- Optional AI checks. Connect your own AI provider or a local model and
Pulse Patrol runs scheduled checks for problems a dashboard only shows if
someone is looking.
- Answers your own AI agent. Point Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode at Pulse
with
pulse-mcp and ask what changed
overnight, whether a host rebooted, or how
a disk filled up. A read-only token is enough.
- Stays hands-off by default. Proxmox is read through a read-only API
token, credentials are encrypted at rest, and agent commands stay off unless
you turn them on.
| Platform |
What Pulse shows |
| Proxmox VE, PBS and PMG |
Nodes, VMs and containers, storage, backups, replication, Ceph and mail gateways |
| Docker and Podman |
Hosts, containers, Compose projects, Swarm services, health, images and updates |
| Kubernetes |
Clusters, nodes, workloads, pods, services, storage and events |
| TrueNAS SCALE and CORE |
Pools, datasets, disks, snapshots, replication tasks, apps and VMs |
| Linux, Windows and macOS |
Host health, filesystems, networking, temperatures, RAID and availability |
| VMware vSphere (early access) |
Hosts, clusters, VMs, datastores, networks and snapshots; validate against your own vCenter before relying on it |
Install
Pulse is one container or service listening on port 7655. The commands below
install the current stable version. If a newer release
is out, use its tag instead.
Docker
docker run -d \
--name pulse \
-p 7655:7655 \
-v pulse_data:/data \
-e PULSE_DEPLOYMENT_METHOD=docker_run \
--restart unless-stopped \
rcourtman/pulse:v6.7.0
The Pulse container does not need the Docker socket. Docker hosts are
monitored by the agent described below.
Proxmox LXC or Linux
The installer is signed. This block downloads it, verifies it against the
pinned pulse-installer key, and only then runs it:
export PULSE_VERSION=v6.7.0
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/rcourtman/Pulse/releases/download/${PULSE_VERSION}/install.sh" &&
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/rcourtman/Pulse/releases/download/${PULSE_VERSION}/install.sh.sshsig" &&
ssh-keygen -Y verify \
-f <(printf '%s\n' 'pulse-installer namespaces="pulse-install" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIMZd/DaH+BldzOkq1A8KVTcFk73nAyrE8aJOyf7i00jm pulse-installer') \
-I pulse-installer \
-n pulse-install \
-s install.sh.sshsig < install.sh &&
bash install.sh --version "${PULSE_VERSION}"
Paste the whole block. If a download or the signature check fails, it stops;
don’t run the last line on its own to get past a failure.
Also available: Docker Compose,
Kubernetes with Helm and the full install guide.
First run
Open http://<your-ip>:7655 and paste the one-time setup token. Get it with
docker exec pulse /app/pulse bootstrap-token on Docker, or
sudo pulse bootstrap-token on Linux (the LXC installer prints the exact
command). Create your admin account, then add your first system with
Add infrastructure under Settings → Infrastructure.
Do you need an agent?
Often not. Proxmox VE, PBS and PMG are monitored through their API with a
read-only token, so no Pulse host agent is required; the generated setup script
creates a privilege-separated monitoring user. Install the unified agent where
an API can’t give Pulse what you want: Docker and Podman hosts, Kubernetes,
standalone machines, or host SMART health and temperatures.
Agents, including v5-to-v6 agent upgrades, are installed with the per-host
command under Settings → Infrastructure → Install on a host. The GitHub
installer above is for the Pulse server only. Command execution is off by
default, the agent’s local listener binds to localhost, and on Linux
--least-privilege runs it as a dedicated non-root user. The
agent security model lists what it can and cannot do
at each privilege level.
[!WARNING]
API-only does not mean guest-agent-free. VM filesystem and memory
requests through QEMU Guest Agent can share the channel used by
freeze-enabled backups. Read-only permissions do not prove backup
safety. Do not add permissions, enable or restart an agent, or send manual
guest-agent probes during a backup, freeze or thaw. An OK backup task does
not prove successful thaw. Stopping Pulse also stops its monitoring and
alerts. Read the backup safety precaution
before you need it.
Editions
- Community (free, this repository): self-hosted monitoring, seven days
of metric history, core SSO, update alerts, and Patrol with your own AI
provider or a local model.
- Pro: Community plus Patrol investigation and fixes, ninety days
of history, centralized agent profiles, RBAC, audit logging and reporting.
- MSP: one Pulse Account running isolated workspaces for each client, with
separate dashboards, alerts, users, audit history and reports. Try it free
for sixty days with two clients at Pulse for MSPs.
Core self-hosted monitoring is not gated by how many systems or child
resources you monitor. See the capability reference and
current plans.
[!IMPORTANT]
GitHub release assets and rcourtman/pulse images are Community builds.
Pro, Relay and eligible legacy customers should install the private image or
Linux archive from the Pulse download portal.
Replacing a private Pro runtime with a Community build removes its private
runtime hooks.
Relay is no longer sold. Existing subscribers keep Pro features at their
current price for as long as their subscription continues, and paired phones
keep working until 31 March 2027. Relay connects the app, not the web UI:
use your own VPN or tunnel for remote access, and add an ntfy, Gotify or
Pushover destination for phone alerts.
Documentation
Getting started in other languages:
Deutsch · Español ·
Français
Community and support
Before filing a bug, read the
safe reporting guidance. Your original
evidence is enough. A second reproduction or diagnostics export is not
required, so please don’t repeat anything that could interrupt workloads or
send duplicate notifications. GitHub reports and attachments are public:
review them locally and keep credentials and private details out.
Development
Pulse is Go 1.26 with a SolidJS and TypeScript frontend. The managed dev
runtime serves the frontend at http://127.0.0.1:5173 and proxies API and
WebSocket traffic to the backend on port 7655.
npm ci
npm --prefix frontend-modern ci
npm run dev
Read CONTRIBUTING.md before starting on a change: Pulse
works issue-first and does not normally accept unsolicited pull requests.
License
Everything in this repository is MIT licensed, with no dual
licensing and no source-available code. Pulse Pro is a separate commercial
product built from private sources, sold through pulserelay.pro
under Terms of Service that apply to that product only.
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