Why Glance is a perfect fit for a VPS
Most self-hosted dashboards (Netdata, Grafana) require a full stack — databases, exporters, configuration files — before they display anything. Glance takes the opposite approach: one YAML file, one Go binary, one container. In under two minutes you have a startpage showing the latest Hacker News discussions, real-time VPS metrics (CPU, RAM, disk, network) and the status of every running Docker container. Auth is built in (username/password + signed session key), removing the need for an external Authelia or reverse-proxy auth layer.
What you get out of the box
- Hacker News — real-time top stories directly on your start page.
- Server Stats — CPU, RAM, disk and network, refreshed every few seconds.
- Docker Containers — list and status of all active containers, via /var/run/docker.sock read-only.
- 30+ additional widget types: RSS, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub releases, weather, clock, stock tickers, search bar, bookmarks…
- Built-in auth — username/password login, sessions secured by a secret key, no third-party auth service needed.
- Under 25 MB RAM at idle — runs on the same VPS as your other services without adding overhead.
Requirements
A VPS with at least 512 MB RAM and Docker installed. Glance is lightweight enough to run alongside other services (Dozzle, Uptime Kuma, etc.) even on a 512 MB server. Ubuntu 24.04 is recommended. No domain name is required — the dashboard is accessible over HTTP on the VPS IP and port 8080.
Deploy Glance on your ServOrbit VPS
Order the VPS
A 1 vCPU / 512 MB RAM plan on Ubuntu 24.04 is more than enough. Glance idles under 25 MB RAM and uses a fraction of a CPU core at rest. You can host it on the same VPS as your other services with no noticeable impact.
Deploy from the ServOrbit marketplace
In your ServOrbit control panel, go to Marketplace → Monitoring & Observability → Glance and click Deploy. The provisioning playbook pulls glanceapp/glance:latest, generates a default glance.yml with your admin credentials and the Hacker News + server stats widgets, and starts the container on port 8080. The dashboard is ready in seconds.
Log in with your admin credentials
Open http://<vps-ip>:8080 in your browser. You are redirected to the Glance login page. Enter the username admin and the password shown in your ServOrbit control panel. You land directly on your Home page with the Hacker News feed and live VPS stats.
Customise your dashboard
SSH into your VPS and edit /data/glance.yml (inside the named Docker volume). Add widget blocks in the columns section — for example - type: rss with a list of feed URLs to follow your favourite blogs, or - type: github-releases to track new releases from your GitHub projects. Save the file and restart: docker compose restart glance. New widgets appear immediately.
Add a custom domain (optional)
Point a subdomain (e.g. dash.your-domain.com) at the VPS IP in your DNS settings. Install Caddy with apt install caddy and create /etc/caddy/Caddyfile: dash.your-domain.com { reverse_proxy localhost:8080 }. Caddy provisions the TLS certificate automatically. Then close port 8080 in UFW to expose Glance only over HTTPS.
Logging in for the first time
Glance asks you for a username and a password: log in with the user admin and the password supplied to you. This password is stored in plain text in the configuration file on your VPS — change it if you share access to the machine.
Combine Glance with Dozzle (Docker logs) and Beszel (multi-server metrics) for a complete monitoring stack. All three run together on a 1 GB VPS without interfering — Glance for the startpage, Dozzle for logs, Beszel for historical metrics and alerts.
Official documentation
For advanced configuration and the full list of available widget types, refer to the official Glance documentation on GitHub. This guide covers deploying on a VPS; the upstream docs are the reference for advanced widgets and updates.
