Provisioning is something that may be out of the picture you described, Terraform, Ansible, templates, whatever, more than creating that server try to recreate

Provisioning is something that may be out of the picture you described, Terraform, Ansible, templates, whatever, more than creating that server try to recreate it after destroying it (and backups while at that). Monitoring using your own tools instead of (or along with) your provider tools will give you a view of not just when it is working wrong, but also when is working right. Security is another thing that goes both for the cloud and your own server, but for long running instances firewalls and vulnerabilities in what is exposed gets more urgent. Regarding performance, if you want to dig in that topic, don't wait for a crisis for using those tools, try to understand how the system run, even if not under high load. Gregg have more tools (https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html) and a few great books.