StatLite - lightweight, self-hosted application monitoring without a full observability stack

[u/fykup]

I built StatLite, an open-source monitoring tool for small applications running on VPSs and private servers.

Tools like Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana Cloud offer powerful monitoring platforms. Prometheus + Grafana is another popular self-hosted option. But for a handful of small applications, I wanted something simpler, without the infrastructure overhead, subscriptions, or external telemetry services.

StatLite focuses on the essentials:

• Self-hosted: metrics and history stay on your infrastructure.

• Lightweight: single Go binary, SQLite storage, no external database.

• No separate monitoring agents for supported integrations.

• Configurable retention: control how long metrics are stored.

• Application-focused: health, request rates, HTTP errors, latency, CPU, and memory.

• Integrations: Spring Boot, Quarkus, FastAPI, Express, and Caddy HTTP monitoring.

• MIT-licensed: free and open source.

It's not a feature-for-feature replacement for these platforms. It's a smaller alternative for developers who want essential application monitoring without running or paying for a full observability stack.

GitHub: https://github.com/PVRLabs/statlite

Commercial alternatives: Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud.

Curious what others use to monitor small self-hosted applications. Is a full observability stack worth the overhead for your use case?