Monitor Your VPS with OpenClaw: Building a Beszel Skill for Server Stats

Keeping tabs on your server's health is crucial when you're running OpenClaw on a VPS. A community member recently shared their solution: a custom CLI and skill that integrates Beszel — a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring tool — directly into OpenClaw.

Why Server Monitoring Matters for AI Agents

When your agent is running 24/7, handling requests, spawning sub-agents, and processing tasks, resource usage can creep up quickly. Without monitoring, you might:

• Run out of disk space from accumulating logs and session files
• Hit memory limits causing slowdowns or crashes
• Miss CPU spikes that indicate runaway processes
• Burn through bandwidth without realizing it

Having your agent aware of server health means it can proactively warn you — or even take action itself.

The Beszel Integration Approach

Beszel is a modern alternative to heavier monitoring stacks like Prometheus + Grafana. It's designed to be simple: a single binary that tracks CPU, memory, disk, network, and more.

The community solution wraps Beszel's API in a CLI tool that OpenClaw can call. The skill exposes commands like:

• beszel status — Quick overview of all monitored systems
• beszel cpu — Current CPU usage and load averages
• beszel disk — Disk space across all volumes
• beszel memory — RAM usage and swap status
• beszel alerts — Any active warnings or thresholds breached

Setting It Up

1. Deploy Beszel: Run it on your VPS (Docker or binary). Configure it to monitor localhost.

2. Create the CLI: Write a wrapper script that queries Beszel's HTTP API and outputs structured data (JSON or plain text).

3. Add the Skill: Create a SKILL.md that tells the agent when to use beszel commands and what the outputs mean.

4. Automate Checks: Use HEARTBEAT.md to have the agent periodically check server health and alert you if disk is above 80% or memory is running low.

Practical Use Cases

• Morning briefings: Agent reports server status alongside your calendar and emails
• Proactive alerts: "Disk is at 85% — should I clean up old session logs?"
• Debug assistance: When something's slow, agent can check if it's a resource issue
• Capacity planning: Track trends over time to know when to upgrade

The Bigger Picture

This pattern — wrapping existing tools into skills — is what makes OpenClaw powerful. You don't need to build everything from scratch. Find good tools, create thin CLI wrappers, and let your agent orchestrate them.

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Credit: This approach was shared by Dolphin-electric in the OpenClaw Discord showcase channel.