Keeping an eye on your NAS doesn’t have to feel like a chore. With the right dashboards, it can actually be… fun. Whether you’re tracking disk usage, CPU temps, or even real-time file transfers, open-source tools give you the flexibility to monitor everything exactly how you want—and they often look awesome doing it.

If you're looking for a new way to keep an eye on your NAS, there are my favorite open-source dashboards that turn NAS monitoring into something I enjoy opening and playing around with.

5 Grafana

The go-to for many NAS enthusiasts

Grafana is my go-to for data visualization on my NAS, and it can do pretty much everything. It supports data sources like Prometheus and InfluxDB (with Telegraf), and it can help you make some incredibly pretty dashboards that you can even export for automatic inclusion in Home Assistant.

Grafana is great because I can build dashboards that show exactly what I care about: disk I/O, CPU temps, network traffic per container, and more. Plus, there are tons of community-made templates you can drop in and tweak, so you don't even need to do all of the work yourself if you want to just use someone else's dashboard instead.

4 Glances

A basic web UI that gets the job done

Glances is a rather basic tool that provides a lot of information. It's super minimal and provides a quick, high-level overview of my NAS through a simple web interface. CPU load, memory, disk usage, temps, it’s all in there at a glance (hence the name).

Glances also supports exporting data to other platforms, including InfluxDB2, Promotheus, MQTT, and more. Plus, you can save data to a JSON or a CSV for later processing if you'd prefer. So, while it looks simple on the surface, it's anything but.

Glances also works on other devices too and isn't just confined to running on a NAS. You can use it on basically anything, so I recommend giving it a try!

3 Zabbix

Overkill for a NAS, but a lot of information

Zabbix is almost certainly overkill for a home lab scenario, but it's a lot of fun to play around with. It's basically Grafana cranked up to 11, so if you fancy a challenge, it's absolutely worth giving a try. You can build your own dashboards and set up rich alerting, historical data, and agent-based monitoring.

While it wouldn't be my first choice for someone looking to get quick at-a-glance data from their NAS, it's a powerful tool that manages to beat all of the others in advanced features. Plus, there are tons of community templates out there for receiving data, so if a device you have isn't supported out of the box, it probably won't be too difficult to get it up and running.

2 Cockpit

A web-based control panel

Cockpit isn’t just a dashboard like the rest here, it’s more like a web-based control panel. I use it to monitor system usage and manage services, updates, and logs. It’s clean, intuitive, and ideal if your NAS is running a Linux distro like Ubuntu or Fedora.

In my case, I used it to manage my Steam Deck when I turned it into a home server. While that project was largely impractical, the level of control Cockpit gave me allowed me to switch over entirely from managing things on my Steam Deck to instead manually controlling it from my PC. It still gives you information about things like CPU usage and storage, but it gives so much more on top of that as well.

1 Netdata

Built-in to TrueNAS

Netdata is a fantastic dashboard that's easy to set up on any NAS. It’s insanely detailed and updates in real-time. You get CPU, memory, disk, and network graphs down to the second, plus it works great out of the box with very little setup. If you have a TrueNAS-based machine, too, then Netdata is already running in the background, and you can view it by going to the Reporting tab.

However, even if you have a TrueNAS machine, it's worth installing it as a separate app. You'll get more control over it, including the ability to integrate it with remote Netdata instances, and sending data to graphing apps like Grafana. It's highly detailed, and you can scroll for what feels like forever to look at a massive amount of data pertaining to your NAS. Netdata has some limitations when deployed across multiple machines, but for just one machine, it works great.