Sure, SQL + something like metabase is a decent starting point (ideally running on a read-only replica). However, there is room to improve over that.

It's like logging. Yeah, there is sentry, papertrail, splunk, datadog and the like. But something better than greping sys logs is nice and totally reasonable for a startup to standup with Kibana/Elastic running on a tiny instance. That can provide significantly higher value.

There is a middle ground between stone tools and jet aircrafts. I was asking: what are the middle ground tools in this space.