One way to save costs would be by using journalctl to view logs then setup your app to send you an email whenever an unhandled exception is raised or some other kind of error occurs.
Grafana doesn't take up gigabytes unless you're doing something crazy; it's about 100mb in my small business deployments. Which still might be too much for your $6 VPS! I would still highly recommend Prometheus, as it's native dashboard has gotten a lot better with 3.0
Poor man's dashboard: Get your desired metrics with grep/wc/whatever shell commands from your logs, and visualize with PyQtGraph/PySide (or even gnuplot, for an even lighter experience).
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