From Logs to Insights: Observability with ClickHouse

As systems grow more distributed, the volume of logs, metrics, and traces generated in real time is exploding. Teams need the ability to ingest this firehose of data and query it instantly for troubleshooting, monitoring, and alerting. Traditional relational databases simply weren’t designed to handle high-velocity inserts and large-scale analytical queries at the same time.

That’s where ClickHouse comes in. Purpose-built for analytical workloads, it can ingest millions of log events per second while delivering sub-second query performance—even on terabytes of data. This makes it a natural fit for observability pipelines and log analytics platforms, where engineers need fast, reliable insights without compromising on scale or cost.

In this workshop, we’ll explore:

  • How ClickHouse’s storage engine and query execution differ from traditional databases.
  • Why these design choices make it so effective for observability use cases.
  • Real-world patterns: powering log search, anomaly detection, and live dashboards at scale.
  • Where ClickHouse is the right fit—and where it isn’t.

Who should join

This session is designed for:

  • Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)
  • DevOps and Platform Engineers
  • Everyone curious about observability and eager to learn more about ClickHouse

  • Observability/Monitoring Leads
  • Software and Engineering Managers
  • Data Engineers and Architects

Workshop hosts

Ryan O'Connor

Senior Solution Architect at Aiven

Ryan O’Connor is a Senior Solutions Architect at Aiven, helping customers design and scale reliable data infrastructure with open source technologies. Before joining Aiven, he spent over a decade in financial services, including data engineering and database administration roles. With hands-on experience in building and managing large-scale data systems, Ryan now works closely with organizations to unlock the full potential of technologies like ClickHouse, Kafka, and PostgreSQL.

    Ville Tainio

    Solution Architect at Aiven

    Solution Architect with a strong background in backend engineering and platform infrastructure Former Senior Software Engineer at Aiven, where he focused on developer experience and system reliability Over 10 years of experience working with distributed systems and cloud-native technologies Deep expertise in Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures Passionate about building resilient systems and helping teams get the most out of their platforms

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