Running one or a handful of Spring Boot applications on a VPS still requires basic operational visibility—reachability, error trends, restarts. You may not need a full monitoring platform. Spring Boot Actuator already exposes health and Micrometer metrics endpoints, but repeatedly opening JSON endpoints isn't a convenient everyday dashboard. Spring Boot Admin adds broader administration features. Prometheus and Grafana are strong for larger systems, but for a few services on one VPS, a narrower dashboard can suffice.

Stat Lite reads Actuator data and shows operational signals most useful during routine checks: health, requests, errors, latency, memory, uptime, restarts. It runs as a single Go binary with SQLite storage, no monitoring agent, no custom instrumentation beyond Actuator. A quick comparison shows Stat Lite has very low operational complexity, best for a few Spring Boot services on a small server, while Prometheus and Grafana suit larger deployments.

Setup takes minutes: expose Actuator health and metrics endpoints, install Stat Lite via release installer, Homebrew, or building from source, configure a target with actuator_base_url, polling interval (default 10s), and SQLite path, then run the binary and open the dashboard on port 9090. The included demo generates traffic to populate charts.

Stat Lite stays small intentionally—single binary, SQLite, suitable for systemd, multiple targets. It's not a replacement for enterprise observability; use a broader platform when you need many services, long retention, advanced queries, alert routing, distributed tracing, centralized logs, or organization-wide dashboards.