Hacker News

ClickHouse replacing Loki finally made our observability stack feel 'right'. It really is a powerhouse for logs and general analytical queries.

oulipo2 9 hours ago [ - ]

How do you use it for visualization? Do you use ClickStack? or something else?

jaysh 7 hours ago [ - ]

Still via Grafana. I ran it side-by-side with Loki and despite trying to optimise Loki and using ClickHouse out of the box - it really was shocking how much faster ClickHouse was for every single query (e.g. in the last 12 hours give my the frequency of logs with a particular JSON event or even "find this log entry, then join back and find the number of times a different entry appears within the same correlation_id)

CubsFan1060 7 hours ago [ - ]

What does the layout in click house look like? Do the input logs need to have a very defined structure?

jaysh 7 hours ago [ - ]

Not really, ClickHouse is super forgiving so you can do something like:

    CREATE TABLE default.events (
      `timestamp` DateTime
      `event` String -- e.g. 'product.updated' or empty/null
      `message` -- human readable message
      `raw` -- the raw message - this is very useful when pushing logs that aren't JSON - you just let the `event` be null and dump the entire message here
    )
    ENGINE = MergeTree
    PARTITION BY toDate(timestamp)
    ORDER BY (timestamp, event)
    TTL timestamp + toIntervalMonth(6)

ClickHouse is extremely performant even in the cases of e.g.: SELECT count(*) FROM `events` WHERE `raw` LIKE '%hello world%'

Of course, the more columns you splat out (e.g. like correlation_id, user_id, order_id, etc) the better you can index and expect those queries to perform but in general I don't bother outside the obvious core domain ones (exampled above), the performance is so good that unindexed queries are significantly faster than indexed queries in Loki. I have reached the point where I JSON extract on-the-fly for the WHERE clause with very large queries with no meaningful performance issues.

oulipo2 4 hours ago [ - ]

Interesting, so you can bind a Clickhouse table as an extension to Grafana? Would you make a little Gist / post about it to show?

jaysh 4 hours ago [ - ]

You only need the plugin: https://clickhouse.com/docs/observability/grafana - then you get basically everything natively.

aleks_me2 6 hours ago [ - ]

I have used SigNoz https://signoz.io/ for that

jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago [ - ]

Worth noting both hyperdx and maple too for other observability on clickhouse options. https://www.hyperdx.io/ https://maple.dev/

usrme 7 hours ago [ - ]

Same question here!

jaysh 7 hours ago [ - ]

Just replied to that question! Let me know if you have other questions.