Observability - ClickHouse Documentation

ClickHouse offers unmatched speed, scale, and cost-efficiency for observability. This guide provides two paths depending on your needs:

ClickStack - the ClickHouse observability stack

The ClickHouse Observability Stack is our recommended approach for most users. ClickStack is a production-grade observability platform built on ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry (OTel), unifying logs, traces, metrics and session in a single high-performance scalable solution that works from single-node deployments to multi-petabyte scale.

Section	Description
Overview	Introduction to ClickStack and its key features
Getting Started	Quick start guide and basic setup instructions
Example Datasets	Sample datasets and use cases
Architecture	System architecture and components overview
Deployment	Deployment guides and options
Configuration	Detailed configuration options and settings
Ingesting Data	Guidelines for ingesting data to ClickStack
Search	How to search and query your observability data
Production	Best practices for production deployment

Build-your-own stack

For users with custom requirements — such as highly specialized ingestion pipelines, schema designs, or extreme scaling needs — we provide guidance to build a custom observability stack with ClickHouse as the core database.

Page	Description
Introduction	This guide is designed for if you’re looking to build your own observability solution using ClickHouse, focusing on logs and traces.
Schema design	Learn why users are recommended to create their own schema for logs and traces, along with some best practices for doing so.
Managing data	Deployments of ClickHouse for observability invariably involve large datasets, which need to be managed. ClickHouse offers features to assist with data management.
Integrating OpenTelemetry	Collecting and exporting logs and traces using OpenTelemetry with ClickHouse.
Using Visualization Tools	Learn how to use observability visualization tools for ClickHouse, including HyperDX and Grafana.
Demo Application	Explore the OpenTelemetry demo application forked to work with ClickHouse for logs and traces.

Prometheus metrics

ClickHouse can store Prometheus metrics in a TimeSeries table and evaluate PromQL queries. See Prometheus protocols and PromQL for ingestion, query, and visualization configuration.

Last modified on August 28, 2026