

ClickStack: ClickHouse’s New Observability Stack Unveiled - OpenObservability Talks S6E03
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:
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
Socials:
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks
Dotan Horovits
============
Twitter: @horovits
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits
Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon
BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social
Mike Shi
=======
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.