I have been meaning to ask the observability experts this question:
Why not dump all metrics , events and logs into Clickhouse ? and purge data as necessary? For small to medium sized businesses/solution ecosystem, will this be be enough ?
Why not dump all metrics , events and logs into Clickhouse ? and purge data as necessary? For small to medium sized businesses/solution ecosystem, will this be be enough ?
ClickHouse is an analytical database (for events). Yes, you can do metrics in there (or PostgreSQL for that matter). Observability has their own needs, so specialized solutions work better, more integrations and out-of-the box tooling already provided.
With generic databases it's more like a constructor that you'd need to develop a lot to become workable. For example, let's say you have 50m active time series, with 1%/hour churn rate. What would be the database structure in ClickHouse? (my answer is that I don't know. I know mostly VictoriaMetrics, and there's no such question there, the structure is already implemented).
Yes, you can use SQL to read metrics directly from ClickHouse tables. However, many people prefer the simplicity of PromQL compared to the flexibility of SQL. So until ClickHouse gets native PromQL support, it is in the early stages.
[1] https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/engines/table-engines/special...