Best Practice for Monitoring, on VPS 2012 Server Standard. Extended Events or Profiler?

Hi, What tools do you use to determine if you should tweak SQL Server configuration and optimize code route, or simply bump up your virtual resources? Can someone share a bag of Extended Events to monitor at the VPS level?   I'm a reasonably decent SQL Developer but never advanced far with DBA efforts. Especially when the mainstream went virtual. Seemed to me that all SQL Servers flexibility with managing disk and memory went out the window now that everything is 'shared', NATed, and Plesked. So I basically dropped out of the conversation and built stuff with SSIS and TSQL. Now, I'm charged with assessing a bottleneck on a VPS Windows 2012 Standard running SQL 2012 Express. I've read that running profiler and traces are deprecated and I've looked a bit at the servers extended events on the hosted environment. I have not run anything. My question: Does it make sense to think in terms of 'levels' in deciding what to moni ...