helmsight

Watch every server from one screen. Install nothing on them.

helmsight is an agentless, self-hosted web dashboard for a fleet of Linux servers. One binary on a central machine connects to your servers over plain SSH, collects metrics and inventory with read-only commands, keeps history in an embedded SQLite database and serves a fast web UI. Nothing is installed, copied or written on the monitored servers.

Status: early development (0.x). helmsight is new. It is tested on Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky, Fedora, openSUSE and Alpine, but it has had little production use and no independent security audit. Configuration options, the API and the database format may change between 0.x releases. Try it on non-critical hosts first, keep a backup of the data directory, and review the security model and the collection script before deploying widely. Collection is read-only; the opt-in Actions feature runs the commands you configure, so enable it with care. helmsight is provided as is, without warranty, under the MIT license. You use it at your own risk.

What you get

• Fleet overview with status, CPU, memory, load, the fullest disk, network, uptime and alerts per host; groups, tags, search and sparklines.
• Host detail with live and historical charts, a per-core CPU heatmap, processes, listening ports, services, containers and system information.
• History for up to 90 days with automatic rollups.
• Drift tracking: what changed since yesterday, host-to-host and baseline comparison of packages, ports, units, kernel and OS.
• Security overview: failed SSH logins, pending security updates, unexpected ports, reboot flags and TLS certificate expiry.
• Alerts with durations and scopes, acknowledgements, silences and notifications by webhook, Slack or email.
• Actions (opt-in): pre-approved commands with confirmation and an append-only audit log.
• Users and roles, TOTP, OpenID Connect single sign-on.
• Wall display for NOC screens, a JSON API with OpenAPI, server-sent events and a Prometheus endpoint.

How it works

1. helmsight keeps one persistent SSH session per host. Every few seconds it runs sh -s on that session and sends a short POSIX shell script on standard input. The script is never written to a file on the remote host and does not appear in its process list.
2. The script only reads: /proc files, df, ps, ss, systemctl, the package database and similar sources. When a tool is missing or not permitted, it reports “n/a” with the reason instead of failing.
3. The output is size-limited, parsed in Rust on the central machine and written to SQLite. Older data is condensed into 1-minute and 5-minute rollups.
4. The web UI is embedded in the binary. The browser only runs code served by helmsight; text coming from remote hosts is never rendered as HTML.

Heavier checks (pending updates, the package inventory) run less often. The security model lists every command and how often it runs.

Design principles

1. Agentless. Nothing is installed or written on monitored hosts.
2. Read-only by default. Only the opt-in Actions feature can change a host, and only with commands an administrator wrote down.
3. No arbitrary command execution. No terminal, no command box.
4. Secure by default. Host keys are verified, the server binds to loopback, secrets are encrypted at rest.
5. Remote output is untrusted. It is size-limited, parsed in Rust and never rendered as HTML.
6. Low overhead. One persistent SSH session and one short shell script per host every few seconds.
7. Portable. Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/Rocky/Alma, Fedora, openSUSE and Alpine (BusyBox).
8. Single binary. The web UI is embedded; deployment is copying one file.

About this documentation

The documentation is available in English and Turkish; the link in the top bar of every page opens the same page in the other language. The UI itself is in English. Menu and button names are written in bold as they appear in the UI, for example Host keys. Configuration keys, commands and API paths are written as code.

Continue with Installation or jump straight to the Quick start.