If you are a HomeKit / iOS user, you should look into Homebridge. Bonus use case – Grafana supports many 3rd party plug-ins and data sources, so you can for example source your workout data from Strava or load spreadsheets from Google Sheets. The interface is very user friendly and requires almost no learning curve. You can display years worth of data in a single chart without knowing anything about queries or databases. This is where Grafana becomes an incredibly useful tool. Once you establish the link between the database and Home Assistant, you will still need a visualization platform for all your dashboards, tables, logs and charts. Other popular option includes MariaDB (which also comes as a native Synology package in case you are struggling with Docker).
Most users choose InfluxDB since it performs very well in storing and retrieving time series data. If you want to understand long-term data trends and perform some more advanced analysis, you will need to ask Home Assistant to store this data in a dedicated database. Home Assistant generates a lot of data and typically retains this information for a limited time (7-10 days) for performance reasons. You can find some of my favorite recipes and dashboards in the Home Assistant category. If you are not happy with the limited optionality and compatibility of Apple HomeKit and Google Home, definitely look into Home Assistant.
BEST NAS FOR HOME LAB UPDATE
With Docker, it is much easier – I can keep an eye on RAM requirements (Home Assistant can be a very memory-intense application depending on your use case), update the container when a new version comes out and restart it when things go wrong. I initially ran Home Assistant on my Mac, but it was always cumbersome to monitor, restart or update the instance. It is a local platform and such relies on your local hardware instead of some cloud capability. Home Assistant is a very powerful open source home automation platform with a large community around it.