Lightweight Spring Boot Monitoring Without Prometheus and Grafana

Running one Spring Boot application or a handful of them on a VPS still calls for basic operational visibility. You need to know whether an application is reachable, whether errors are rising, and whether it restarted. You may not need a complete monitoring platform to answer those questions.

Spring Boot Actuator already exposes much of that information through its health endpoint and Micrometer metrics. StatLite turns it into a focused dashboard for health, requests, errors, latency, memory, uptime, and restarts. It runs as one Go binary and stores its history in SQLite.

Why the usual options can be more than you need

Actuator gives Spring Boot applications useful health and Micrometer metrics endpoints. They are excellent for integration, but repeatedly opening JSON endpoints is not a convenient everyday dashboard.

Spring Boot Admin provides rich application administration, but running a separate Spring Boot application for monitoring can be heavy on a small VPS. Prometheus and Grafana are strong choices when you need a larger monitoring system, flexible queries, or long-term retention across an estate.

For a few services on one VPS, a narrower dashboard can be enough. StatLite reads the Actuator data you already have and shows the operational signals most useful during routine checks.

Quick comparison

These tools can also coexist. Choosing StatLite for a focused dashboard today does not prevent adopting Prometheus and Grafana later if your requirements grow.

Set up StatLite in a few minutes

These steps assume an existing Spring Boot application with Actuator. To try StatLite without one, the repository includes a runnable Spring Actuator demo with a traffic generator.

1. Expose health and Prometheus metrics from Spring Boot

Add io.micrometer:micrometer-registry-prometheus if the application does not already include it, then expose health and the Prometheus endpoint. Keep Actuator reachable only from trusted networks and add authentication where your deployment requires it.

management:
  endpoints:
    web:
      exposure:
        include: health,prometheus
  endpoint:
    health:
      show-details: always

2. Install StatLite

The recommended path on macOS or Linux is the release installer, which installs statlite to ~/.local/bin:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PVRLabs/statlite/main/install.sh | sh

Add ~/.local/bin to your PATH if it is not already included. For Homebrew and other options, see the StatLite installation guide.

3. Add one target configuration

Save the following as statlite.yaml:

server:
  listen: "127.0.0.1:9090"

storage:
  sqlite_path: "./statlite.sqlite"

polling:
  interval: "30s"
  timeout: "5s"

targets:
  - name: "my-spring-app"
    type: "spring"
    url: "http://127.0.0.1:8080/actuator"

listen keeps the dashboard local by default. sqlite_path is the file used for dashboard history. url is the Actuator management base URL. StatLite collects health from Actuator and application metrics from /actuator/prometheus. For Basic Auth, multiple targets, retention, and production security details, see the configuration documentation.

4. Open the dashboard

statlite --config ./statlite.yaml

Open http://127.0.0.1:9090 in a browser. StatLite polls on the configured interval, so wait for the next poll after creating traffic or restarting the application.

Why StatLite stays small

• No Java agent or per-application monitoring agent
• No custom application instrumentation beyond Actuator and Micrometer
• Multiple Spring Boot targets in one configuration

It is intentionally Actuator-first. You enable or expose Actuator as needed; StatLite does not remove that setup step.

When not to use StatLite

Use a broader observability platform when you need many services or hosts, long retention, advanced metric queries, alert routing, distributed tracing, centralized logs, or organization-wide dashboards.

StatLite is not a replacement for enterprise observability. It is a focused option when the operational job is to monitor a few Spring Boot applications without operating a full Prometheus and Grafana stack.

Related resources

For a 512 MB VPS measurement with Spring Boot and the dashboard included, see Spring Boot on a 512 MB VPS: How Lightweight Monitoring Still Fits.

For a Spring Boot API that slows down during a CPU-heavy job, see My API Is Up, but Slow. Is It My Code or the Server?