Workshop

Objective:

In this workshop, we’ll explore how ClickHouse, the fastest OLAP database, can be leveraged as a powerful monitoring system.

Target Audience

This workshop will give attendees practical knowledge on how to leverage ClickHouse for real-time monitoring / observability, making it highly relevant for DevOps engineers and SREs.

Workshop Overview

**Why Me? ** Being a senior support engineer in ClickHouse, I have lots of hands-on experience working with ClickHouse for monitoring and observability use cases as well as many stories and pitfalls to share with the audience.

ClickHouse is gaining traction as a high-performance OLAP database, but its potential as a monitoring system is still under estimated.

Participants will go through a hands-on journey covering:

• Data modeling, ingestion, and querying - understanding how to structure, store, and retrieve monitoring data efficiently.
• An introduction to data-driven queries – optimizing query performance based on real-world monitoring use cases.
• ClickHouse fundamentals – a primer on its key features and why it excels in high-speed analytics.
• Bonus ! Charting and visualization on data

Workshop Agenda (90 minutes):

1. (10min) Introduction - Overview of ClickHouse’s role in observability and AI observability
2. (15min) Log ingestion setup - Hands-on: Sending logs to ClickHouse (python client libraries)
3. (15min) Querying Logs for Patterns - Hands-on: ClickHouse SQL queries for log insights and data transformation using Materialized view
4. (20min) AI-Based Anomaly Detection - Hands-on: Training a simple ML model on log data (Python client libraries)
5. (20min) Automated Alerting with AI - Hands-on: Using AI to trigger alerts (Grafana)
6. (10min) Q&A + Wrap-up

Key Takeaways

This session is ideal for developers and DevOps engineers looking to build scalable, real-time monitoring solutions with ClickHouse

Benefits for Developers, especially those working on data-intensive applications, AI/ML pipelines, or real-time analytics can leverage ClickHouse for its performance and flexibility. Here are three key benefits:

• Lightning-Fast Query Performance for Real-Time Analytics
• Rich SQL Support for Familiar Development
• Support for AI and ML Workflows (Feature Engineering and Vector Search) Benefits for Ops Teams

Benefits for Operations Teams, responsible for managing infrastructure, ensuring reliability, and optimizing performance (key concerns in DevOps practices), find ClickHouse valuable for its scalability and operational simplicity. Here are three benefits:

• Linear Scalability and Hardware Efficiency
• High Reliability with Multi-Master Replication
• Simplified Operations with Good Observability

Prerequisites for Participants

• Basic understanding of containers and docker experience
• Basic SQL knowledge
• A laptop with your favourite IDE, Docker and the docker-compose CLI installed.
• A GitHub account
• Internet is required as we would be using the cloud-based ClickHouse instance

Useful Links

1. ClickHouse Cloud Quick Start

Jason is Senior Support Engineer in ClickHouse Cloud across the globe. Actively engaging with customers to solve realtime analytics challenges, running trainings to enable customers and developers.