Videos
Introducing ClickStack
Mark Needham
In this comprehensive tutorial, we explore ClickStack, an innovative observability platform that revolutionizes how you handle logs, traces, and metrics by storing them all in a single ClickHouse database. This unified approach makes it incredibly easy to correlate signals across your entire infrastructure and applications.
ClickStack is built around three core components that work seamlessly together. First, there's the ClickStack distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector, which serves as your data ingestion gateway. OpenTelemetry has become the industry standard for observability data, making this collector the natural choice for handling your telemetry streams. The second component is ClickHouse, explicitly chosen for its exceptional performance with high-cardinality data and lightning-fast aggregations that observability workloads demand. Finally, HyperDX provides an intuitive user interface that brings all your data together with powerful querying capabilities and correlation features.
What makes ClickStack particularly compelling is its flexibility. While it's OpenTelemetry native and works best with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, it's not exclusively tied to it. You can ingest data from various sources, including S3, Kafka, and other agents, giving you the freedom to work with your existing infrastructure.
Key Learning Points:
✅ Complete architecture walkthrough and hands-on Docker setup
✅ Real-time monitoring demo with practical webcam connection example
✅ Advanced querying techniques using HyperDX's Lucene-like syntax
✅ Metrics visualization with Chart Explorer and CPU utilization analysis
✅ Configuration best practices for OpenTelemetry collector and API integration
Blog - https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickstack-a-high-performance-oss-observability-stack-on-clickhouse
