ClickHouse in Practice: Lessons from Building a Scalable Observability Backend

Nityananda Gohain, Software Engineer at SigNoz

Srikanth Chekuri, Software Engineer at SigNoz Delivered during the Bangalore meetup on February 8, this talk is an in-depth technical exploration of SigNoz's evolving schema design journey with ClickHouse. SigNoz engineers walked through their schema iterations for storing observability data, focusing on how they adapted our data models to handle growing volumes of metrics, traces, and logs.

This talk showcase SigNoz's schema evolution strategies, including the rationale behind key design decisions and their impact on query performance. You’ll learn practical tips for optimizing ClickHouse schemas, mistakes to avoid, and insights into key design decisions for handling different types of data. This session is tailored for both beginners and experienced users, sharing real-world lessons from our production environment.

The slides can be found at https://github.com/ClickHouse/clickhouse-presentations/blob/master/2025-meetup-bangalore-1/Talk%204%20-%20SigNoz_Bangalore%20Meetup_08Feb25.pdf