The ClickHouse open source project has gained interest in the observability community, thanks to its outstanding performance benchmarks. Now ClickHouse is doubling down on observability with the release of ClickStack, a new open source observability stack that bundles in ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry and HyperDX frontend.

I invited Mike Shi, the co-founder of HyperDX and co-creator of ClickStack, to tell us all about this new project. Mike is Head of Observability at ClickHouse, and brings prior observability experience with Elasticsearch and more.

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/73f129a179a3/

Show Notes:

00:00 episode and guest intro

04:38 taking the open source path as an entrepreneur

10:51 the HyperDX observability user experience

16:08 challenges in implementing observability directly on ClickHouse

20:03 intro to ClickStack and incorporating OpenTelemetry

32:35 balancing simplicity and flexibility

36:15 SQL vs. Lucene query languages

39:06 performance, cardinality and the new JSON type

52:14 use cases in production by OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and more

55:38 episode outro

Resources:

HyperDX https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx
ClickStack https://clickhouse.com/docs/use-cases/observability/clickstack
Shopify’s Journey to Planet-Scale Observability: https://medium.com/p/9c0b299a04dd
ClickHouse: Breaking the Speed Limit for Observability and Analytics https://medium.com/p/2004160b2f5e

New JSON data type for ClickHouse: https://clickhouse.com/blog/a-new-powerful-json-data-type-for-clickhouse

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Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

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Mike Shi

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Twitter: https://x.com/MikeShi42

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeshi42

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mikeshi42.bsky.social

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

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