Embedded in ClickHouse

ClickStack is bundled directly into the ClickHouse server binary. This means you can access the ClickStack UI (HyperDX) from your ClickHouse instance without deploying any additional components. This deployment is similar to the public demo at play-clickstack.clickhouse.com, but running against your own ClickHouse instance and data.

Suitable for

• Trying ClickStack with minimal setup
• Exploring your own ClickHouse data with an observability UI
• Demos and evaluations

Limitations

This embedded version is not designed for production use. The following features are not available compared to the production-ready OSS deployments:

• Alerting
• Dashboard and search persistence — dashboards and saved searches are not retained across sessions
• Customizable query settings
• Event patterns

Deployment steps

Start ClickHouse

Docker

Pull and run the ClickHouse server image with a password set:

docker run --rm -it -p 8123:8123 -e CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD=password clickhouse/clickhouse-server:head-alpine

Running without a password

If you prefer to run without a password, you must explicitly enable default access management:

docker run --rm -it -p 8123:8123 -e CLICKHOUSE_DEFAULT_ACCESS_MANAGEMENT=1 clickhouse/clickhouse-server:head-alpine

Binary

Download and start ClickHouse:

curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh

./clickhouse server

The default user has no password when running from the binary.

Navigate to the ClickStack UI

Open http://localhost:8123 in your browser and click ClickStack.

Enter your credentials. If using the Docker example above, the username is default and the password is password. If using the binary, the username is default with no password.

Create a source

After logging in, you'll be prompted to create a data source. If you have existing OpenTelemetry tables, retain the default values and complete the Table field with the appropriate table name (e.g. otel_logs). All other settings should be auto-detected, allowing you to click Save New Source.

If you don't have data yet, see "Ingesting data" for available options.

Next steps

If you're ready to move beyond evaluation, consider a production-ready deployment:

• All-in-One — single container with all components, including persistence and authentication
• Docker Compose — individual components for more control
• Helm — recommended for production Kubernetes deployments
• Managed ClickStack — fully managed on ClickHouse Cloud