Aliases for Hosts and Adjustable column widths in tables

[adamjeffery]

I have just started using Pulse and it is ticking a lot of the boxes I am looking for but I noticed two quality of life improvements that would make using it a little easier.

The first is being able to give an Alias to a host as I have some that are simply 'localhost' and even though I gave the token a name it does not show in the host list so I have ambiguity as to what system I am looking at, and being able to set an alias for the host helps.

The second is being able to adjust columns in tables as I have a docker container image name that pushes the columns for CPU. Memory, and alike to the right and out of view.

Troublesome container name: ghcr.io/immich-app/postgres:14-vectorchord0.4.3-pgvectors0.2.0@sha256:bcf63357191b76a916ae5eb93464d65c07511da41e3bf7a8416db519b40b1c23

[rcourtman]

Host Aliases: Pulse v5 (currently in Release Candidate) supports display names for hosts. When installing the unified agent, you can use the --name flag:

curl -fsSL https://your-pulse-server/install.sh | bash -s -- --name "My Custom Name"

For existing hosts, you can update the display name through the UI or reinstall the agent with the --name flag.

Column Widths: This has been requested before - currently there's no resizable columns, but the table layout has been improved in v5 with better responsive sizing.

[RafaelSz]

How this command should look for windows like? Whatever I try I get "A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument '--name'".
My command: $env:PULSE_URL="https://xxx.example.com"; $env:PULSE_TOKEN="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"; irm https://xxx.example.com/install.ps1 -- --name "ServerName". Agent works, but shows server's HOSTNAME. Also how to change the name in UI? I see no such option.
Documentation has no "--name" parameter in file "UNIFIED_AGENT.md"...
Pulse | Version: [5.1.23]

[rcourtman]

Sorry for the confusion in my earlier reply — the correct flag is --hostname, not --name.

For Windows, the install script now supports a $Hostname parameter (added in the next release). You can set it via environment variable before running the installer:

$env:PULSE_URL="https://your-pulse-server"
$env:PULSE_TOKEN="your-token"
$env:PULSE_HOSTNAME="My Custom Server Name"
irm https://your-pulse-server/install-host-agent.ps1 | iex

In the current release, the workaround is to edit C:\Program Files\Pulse\config.json, add "hostname": "My Custom Server Name", then restart the service:

Restart-Service -Name PulseHostAgent

[rcourtman]

(Correction to my previous reply — the config.json edit will not work since the agent reads hostname from CLI args, not the config file. The only workaround in the current release is to recreate the service manually with the flag.)

The $env:PULSE_HOSTNAME approach will work cleanly once the next release ships.

[RafaelSz]

Thank you for a quick answer! I noticed that "C:\Program Files\Pulse" is empty folder. I believe the next release comes soon, so I'll better wait. Great software by the way!

[pulse-triage[bot]]

The older examples above should not be used to paste a token into PowerShell or pipe a downloaded script into iex. Use the Windows private-file instructions: keep the token in the ACL-protected file, download and inspect the installer, then use -TokenFile rather than an inline secret.

How Pulse handles triage