pylon-beacon is our open-source agent: a single static binary that pushes your node's vitals to PylonMon — CPU, memory, per-mount disk, temperature, load, uptime, and anything you add. Because it pushes outbound, it works behind NAT, CGNAT, and firewalls, on any box you'd never open a port on. Free for your first 3 nodes.
curl -fsSL https://pylonmon.com/beacon.sh | shirm https://pylonmon.com/beacon.ps1 | iexnode-exporter opens a port and waits to be scraped — which means firewall rules, reachability, and running Prometheus. pylon-beacon only makes outbound requests. Zero ports, zero attack surface.
Homelab in a closet, a Pi on hotel Wi-Fi, a client box you don't control the network for — if it can reach the internet, it can report in.
Miss a few pushes and PylonMon pages you — the same dead-man's-switch that protects a cron job now protects a whole machine.
CPU, memory, per-mount disk, and temperature with
sparklines and daily min/avg/max — plus threshold alerts (disk > 90%) with no Prometheus
in sight.
Add any metric with one config line — the first number a command prints becomes a data point. GPU temp, queue depth, RAID health, your call.
Beacons authenticate with an ingest-scoped key — it can send metrics and nothing else, so it's safe on every box you own.
| pylon-beacon | node-exporter + Prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Pushes out | Scraped (inbound) |
| Open ports | None | Yes (9100) |
| Works behind NAT | Yes | Only with a tunnel/VPN |
| Needs Prometheus | No | Yes (+ Alertmanager) |
| Alerting included | Yes — threshold rules + heartbeat | Configure PromQL rules |
| Setup | One command | Exporter + Prom + Alertmanager + rules |
| Cost | Free for 3 nodes | Free, self-hosted (you run the stack) |
Already run Prometheus? Great — PylonMon ingests your Alertmanager alerts too. pylon-beacon is for everywhere you don't want to stand up a monitoring stack.
After installing, point it at your workspace with an ingest key and (optionally) extend what it collects:
# /etc/pylon-beacon.conf
key = pm_xxxxxxxxxxxx # an ingest-scoped key (Settings → Admin → Status page & API)
interval = 20
[custom] # first number in the output becomes the metric
gpu_temp_c = nvidia-smi --query-gpu=temperature.gpu --format=csv,noheader
queue_depth = redis-cli llen jobsThe first push auto-creates a node monitor named after the machine — no clicking. Full reference in the docs, and the source is on GitHub (MIT).
Install the agent, watch a machine appear in PylonMon within a minute, and get paged the moment it goes
quiet — with vital threshold alerts (disk > 90%) on every plan. Need more than 3? Pro ($4/mo) raises it to your full monitor cap.