[chocolatkey]

Exactly. I'm currently building in-house analytics (thanks Clickhouse) due to GA4 as well.

The only way I'm able to use GA4 in any way is with their search box + autocomplete, you can sometimes get a decent query result, then you click the three dots next to the tiny line chart, export as CSV and you get the data.

And for events, I think they want you to pay for BigQuery, so you only get some kind of aggregate count, which is useless. It'a too confusing to figure out if I'm wrong about that.

[hrpnk]

In bigger setups, all you want is a data collector and router so that you can feed the data into multiple destinations, depending on the use case. Analytics is just one. Example: https://www.rudderstack.com/ & https://www.rudderstack.com/replace-google-analytics-4-guide...

[toddgardner]

We (request metrics, author) are also using clickhouse. But we go beyond analytics to integrate performance, security, api monitoring, and errors under a single interface. We think of it as “client side observability”.