Some examples I have either used it for previously or would like to in the near future:

more traditional analytics stuff:

• clock a +1 for signups (StatHat gives a good, simple graph for stats like this, with time as x-axis)
• clock a +1 for user activation
• clock a +1 for click to use a particular feature

I know some or all of the above can be done with analytics systems like Mixpanel, but they'd usually a little heavier for these and demand a little more investment in terms of designing what to log and removing them when I'm done with those stats. Something like StatHat is just easier in some cases.

More counters or logging territory (but without attaching an object to log):

• clock a +1 for hitting some potential hotspot in the code
• clock a +1 for hitting some potential error path in the code that I'm not sure happens enough to be worth handling more elaborately

I've used DataDog for this (so I suppose BetterStack and friends too) support this pattern of logging and then configuring a widget to show a summary based on log patterns and extraction from json object in the logs.

systems-like stuff:

• CPU usage
• RAM usage

I might not use this anymore since I default to Render (and Digital Ocean) now and they cover this. But it might still be useful since I use 2 providers, to have it in the same dashboard.

About BetterStack, can it basically do something like this:

I've used DataDog for this (so I suppose BetterStack and friends too) support this pattern of logging and then configuring a widget to show a summary based on log patterns and extraction from json object in the logs.

Say I log this output:

some error at home: <an error message> object: {"foo":"bar", "count": 99}

Can I configure a widget to display by the pattern "some error at home" and extract and sum the "count" field into an aggregate?

When I look at betterstack.com, the "Compare" list at the bottom are all some form of uptime monitoring or status page (disclaimer: I build a monitoring tool too, but it's not my current active project).