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Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

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Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#71
post #4

How are you different than Signoz, another YC company that also does Observability using clickhouse ?

Echoing the comment below, I guess one obvious thing is that we are a team at ClickHouse and an official first-party product on top. That translates into: - We're flexible on top of any ClickHouse instance, you can use virtually any schema in ClickHouse and things will still work. Custom schemas are pretty important for either tuned high performance or once you're at a scale like Anthropic. This makes it also incredi…

hey, SigNoz maintainer here.

> an official first-party product on top

So, seems like the direction you are going is trying to enable ingestion to different ClickHouse instances (Cloud/BYOC/Self hosted) and then use HyperDX as the query & visualization layer on top.

I think, fundamental difference we have at SigNoz on how we approach this is that we want to solve for observability and the fact that we use ClickHouse today is just a point in time fact. In future, we are open to use any other datastore which may be more performant for observability. We can also use different databases to augment different use cases in observability.

>Ultimately from a product philosophy standpoint, we aren't big believers in the "3 pillars" concept, which tends to manifest as 3 silos/tabs for "logs", "metrics", "traces" (this isn't just SigNoz - but across the industry).

I am not too sure on how this works in practice, do you expect people to write metrics and logs query in the same explorer. From our experience, the query writing experience is very different for logs and metrics and you need different defaults to make the query writing UX easier for users.

Though I agree, the ability to query across signals is an important point and we are already doing work on this at SigNoz (https://signoz.io/blog/observability-requires-querying-acros...).

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#72
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think settling to otel as transport/wire-format is an excellent strategic choice offering most possibilities towards the future. Two concerns less.

I'm less concerned about the wire format than reducing complexity and bottlenecks in a high-volume, high-throughput system. Needing an intermediate API just to ingest into ClickHouse adds another step where things can slow down or break, not to mention that a gRPC API just to convert JSON payloads into INSERTs is quite wasteful if you can just insert directly.

VictoriaLogs developer here. I agree with you - it is important to support multiple popular data ingestion protocols at the database for logs, so users could continue using the existing protocol instead of adding an intermediate proxy for converting from one protocol to another protocol.

That's why VictoriaLogs supports multiple data ingestion protocol [1], including JSON line protocol, which can be used for sending JSON logs into it without any conversions [2].

[1] https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/data-ingestion...

[2] https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/data-ingestion...

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#73

We run a full Grafana stack (Loki, tempo, Prometheus, alloy agent, Grafana) and back out with self hosted S3 (we are all onprem physical hardware). While I do like the stack we have, it is a lot of components to run and configure. Don’t think we have ever had any issues once it was up and running. Does anyone have any thoughts about how this compares? We don’t have a huge amount of days, 1 month of metrics is about 2…

200GB of metrics and 1TB of logs can be efficiently processed by a single-node observability solution optimized for metrics/logs (for example, VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaLogs), which runs on a low-end computer such as Raspberry Pi. There is zero sense in complicating the system with clustering, micro-service architecture and object storage for such a small-scale workload :)

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#74
post #12

This is really interesting. Is Clickhouse the only stateful part of this stack? Would love to see compatbility with Rotel[0], a Rust implementation of the OTEL collector, so that this becomes usable for serverless runtime environments. One key thing Datadog has is their own proprietary alternative to the OTEL collector that is much more performant. [0]: https://github.com/streamfold/rotel

For anyone else stumbling on this: looks like MongoDB is used for the storage layer of the UI.

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#75

Why did they decide to build a custom front end vs leverage Grafana that’s already as the front layer?

https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/v12.0.1/LICENSE being AGPLv3 likely is a non-trivial part of that

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#76
post #70

This is really cool considering how expensive DataDog can get. I'm the author of LogLayer ( https://loglayer.dev ), which is a structured logger for TypeScript that allows you to use multiple loggers together. I've written transports that allows shipping to other loggers like pino and cloud providers such as DataDog. I spent some time writing an integration for HyperDX after seeing this post and hope you can help me…

Could you add the ability to ship logs to VictoriaLogs? The logs can be shipped via one of the supported data ingestion protocols - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/data-ingestion...

Definitely possible. HTTP direct send is a common pattern that I'm working on an HTTP-specific transport that can be used for these use-cases (vs making a unique impl for each one).

I'll reach out when this is available.

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#77
post #61

Can I say it's similar to Signoz, in that both are ClickHouse-powered and available as both open-source and hosted versions? How are you guys different compared to Signoz? (The UI looks similar too, although I guess a lot of observability tools seem to adopt that kind of UI).

Interested in a comparison between both too!

I've written up a detailed answer in a thread below earlier :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44196484

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#78

Very cool, reminds me of SigNoz. How would I self host this in k8s? Would I deploy a ClickHouse cluster using the Altinity operator and then connect it using the HyperDX local mode or what is the recommended approach to self-host ClickStack?

For getting started, we have a really easy to use helm chart that I'd recommend checking out first: https://clickhouse.com/docs/use-cases/observability/clicksta...

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#79
post #74
post #12

This is really interesting. Is Clickhouse the only stateful part of this stack? Would love to see compatbility with Rotel[0], a Rust implementation of the OTEL collector, so that this becomes usable for serverless runtime environments. One key thing Datadog has is their own proprietary alternative to the OTEL collector that is much more performant. [0]: https://github.com/streamfold/rotel

For anyone else stumbling on this: looks like MongoDB is used for the storage layer of the UI.

Ah sorry I missed that part of the question, yes MongoDB and ClickHouse are the two stateful services. We'll be looking to see if we can offer some mode to simplify it down to just ClickHouse but that'll take a bit more work.

Re: Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

#80

Really interesting, Unfortunately, it looks like HyperDX depends on Mongo? I wonder if there are any open source document stores (possibly a mongo compatible one)( that could work with it?

FerretDB looks like a great alternative, thanks! I'll be keeping Ferret and ClickStack on my radar!

FerretDB maintainer here - feel free to join our Community Slack and ping me if you want to learn more! https://join.slack.com/t/ferretdb/shared_invite/zt-36uaz8zgg...
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