Simplest monitoring setup for Ubuntu/Slicehost & PHP Web App
My question is - ***What is the quickest way to setup resource & app monitoring for a work-in-progress PHP app on Slicehost?***

I am learning more and more about launching web applications and there seems to be a ton of things to take care of. One of the things that I recently found out I needed was a monitoring tool. 

I researched on the web and looked up answers here obviously, but seems that there isn't a well-documented answer on here. For valid reasons. Things seem to be changing very quickly in this space and there are a whole bunch of issues to deal with. Issues that I listed down for myself are

 - Time to setup
 - Resources to run
 - One time cost or monthly cost
 - Depth/breadth of monitoring
 - 'Actionability'
 - Notifications
 - Resource monitoring only or Application centric Event monitoring as well?

With those in mind, here's what I came up with as the possible options

**Self Hosted**

 - Monit
 - Nagios
 - Cacti
 - Splunk

**SaaS**

 - New Relic
 - Scout
 - Pingdom
 - Google Analytics (classic + app stuff only)
 - Mixpanel (app stuff only)

I am as cookie-cutter as they come, so I am running my LAMP app off a **256MB Slice on Slicehost (Ubuntu 10.04)**. So there's no way that I am thinking of paying $49+ per month at this stage (alpha development) of my application. 

I don't mind a mix of two, like __________ + Google Analytics. Believe this may be the optimal solution. Just don't know what's the best way to fill in that blank.

I would really appreciate a detailed answer for a newbie like me. Thank you!
Simplest monitoring setup for Ubuntu/Slicehost & PHP Web App
===

My question is - ***What is the quickest way to setup resource & app monitoring for a work-in-progress PHP app on Slicehost?***

I am learning more and more about launching web applications and there seems to be a ton of things to take care of. One of the things that I recently found out I needed was a monitoring tool. 

I researched on the web and looked up answers here obviously, but seems that there isn't a well-documented answer on here. For valid reasons. Things seem to be changing very quickly in this space and there are a whole bunch of issues to deal with. Issues that I listed down for myself are

 - Time to setup
 - Resources to run
 - One time cost or monthly cost
 - Depth/breadth of monitoring
 - 'Actionability'
 - Notifications
 - Resource monitoring only or Application centric Event monitoring as well?

With those in mind, here's what I came up with as the possible options

**Self Hosted**

 - Monit
 - Nagios
 - Cacti
 - Splunk

**SaaS**

 - New Relic
 - Scout
 - Pingdom
 - Google Analytics (classic + app stuff only)
 - Mixpanel (app stuff only)

I am as cookie-cutter as they come, so I am running my LAMP app off a **256MB Slice on Slicehost (Ubuntu 10.04)**. So there's no way that I am thinking of paying $49+ per month at this stage (alpha development) of my application. 

I don't mind a mix of two, like __________ + Google Analytics. Believe this may be the optimal solution. Just don't know what's the best way to fill in that blank.

I would really appreciate a detailed answer for a newbie like me. Thank you!