[opensourcedex]

ClickStack is a free, open source marketing & customer engagement project written in TypeScript and released under MIT. It has 9,997 GitHub stars, 517 forks and 270 open issues, and was last pushed 23 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #18 of 77 tracked projects in Marketing & Customer Engagement, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available.

What is ClickStack?

ClickStack is an MIT-licensed, open source observability platform — formerly known as HyperDX — that gives engineers a single place to search and visualize logs, metrics, traces, session replays and errors on top of any ClickHouse cluster.

What it is

ClickStack is a TypeScript-written observability application built for the ClickHouse ecosystem. It combines a web UI, an OpenTelemetry Collector and a set of SDKs, and it is deliberately schema agnostic: it works on top of an existing ClickHouse schema instead of demanding that telemetry be reshaped to fit a fixed one. The all-in-one image bundles ClickHouse, the ClickStack UI, the OpenTelemetry Collector and MongoDB, so the whole stack can be evaluated as a single container. Documentation, a live demo and the source live alongside the project, with the homepage at hyperdx.io.

The concrete problem it solves is incident triage across telemetry that normally sits in separate tools. Engineers need to jump between logs, traces, metrics, session replays and errors while working out why production is broken; ClickStack correlates all of them in one interface. The specific thing it replaces is Kibana for teams whose telemetry already lives in ClickHouse — the README describes the project plainly as "imagine Kibana, for ClickHouse" — and because it accepts OpenTelemetry, the CNCF vendor-neutral instrumentation standard, it does not require re-instrumenting applications to adopt it.

Key capabilities

  • Correlated search and visualization across logs, metrics, session replays and traces in one place, using full-text and property search syntax such as level:err, with SQL optional.
  • Schema-agnostic operation on top of an existing ClickHouse schema, plus native JSON string querying represented in the README by {.
  • OpenTelemetry support out of the box, with the all-in-one image exposing an OTel collector on port 4317 for gRPC and port 4318 for HTTP.
  • Live tailing of logs and traces, alerting configured in a few clicks, and dashboards for high cardinality events without a complex query language.
  • Event deltas for analyzing trends in anomalies, and APM views that monitor health and performance from HTTP requests down to database queries.
  • A command-line interface, @hyperdx/cli, installed as the hdx command, offering an interactive TUI with vim-style keybindings, dashboard tiles and ad-hoc charts rendered as ANSI output, raw SQL and NDJSON output, and Drain log pattern mining for scripts and agents.

Who uses it and how

  • Engineers evaluating the platform locally run the all-in-one container; the README recommends at least 4GB of RAM and 2 cores for testing.
  • Teams that already operate a ClickHouse cluster point ClickStack at it and keep their current schema, avoiding a migration of stored telemetry.
  • Organizations wanting managed infrastructure deploy against ClickHouse Cloud after a free sign-up, rather than hosting ClickHouse themselves.
  • Kubernetes environments are supported, both as a repository topic and as a platform covered by OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
  • Application developers send data in using the provided Browser, Node.js and Python SDKs, or by pointing any OpenTelemetry SDK at the collector on http://localhost:4318.

Getting started

Run docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 docker.clickhouse.com/clickhouse/clickstack-all-in-one and open http://localhost:8080 for the ClickStack UI. Terminal users can instead install the CLI with npm install -g @hyperdx/cli, and production deployment options are documented separately on clickhouse.com.

How it compares

The comparable tool named in the project's own material is Kibana, which ClickStack explicitly positions itself against as the equivalent search and visualization layer for ClickHouse. The distinction rests on the backend and the ingestion standard: ClickStack is designed for any ClickHouse cluster, is schema agnostic once connected, and ingests OpenTelemetry data natively rather than depending on one vendor's agent.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must operate ClickHouse, the OpenTelemetry Collector and the UI — plus MongoDB if following the all-in-one bundle — and must open ports 8080, 8000 and 4318 on the firewall for the UI, API and collector respectively. Teams with no ClickHouse deployment and no appetite to run one, or those who want a fully managed service with nothing to operate, should look elsewhere; applications also need SDK or OpenTelemetry instrumentation before any data appears. The repository carries 270 open issues, and much of the operational guidance, including production deployment instructions, lives in external documentation rather than the README.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

ClickStack

GitHub stars License Release Join the ClickStack Discord

ClickHouse%2FClickStack | Trendshift

ClickStack (formerly HyperDX) helps engineers quickly figure out why production is broken by making it easy to search & visualize logs and traces on top of any ClickHouse cluster (imagine Kibana, for ClickHouse).

Documentation • Chat on Discord • Live Demo • Bug Reports • Contributing • Website

  • 🕵️ Correlate/search logs, metrics, session replays and traces all in one place
  • 📝 Schema agnostic, works on top of your existing ClickHouse schema
  • 🔥 Blazing fast searches & visualizations optimized for ClickHouse
  • 🔍 Intuitive full-text search and property search syntax (ex. level:err), SQL optional!
  • 📊 Analyze trends in anomalies with event deltas
  • 🔔 Set up alerts in just a few clicks
  • 📈 Dashboard high cardinality events without a complex query language
  • { Native JSON string querying
  • ⚡ Live tail logs and traces to always get the freshest events
  • 🔭 OpenTelemetry supported out of the box
  • ⏱️ Monitor health and performance from HTTP requests to DB queries (APM)

Spinning Up ClickStack

The all-in-one image bundles ClickHouse, the ClickStack UI, the OpenTelemetry Collector and MongoDB.

docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 docker.clickhouse.com/clickhouse/clickstack-all-in-one

Afterwards, you can visit http://localhost:8080 to access the ClickStack UI.

If you already have an existing ClickHouse instance, want to use a single container locally, or are looking for production deployment instructions, you can view the different deployment options in our deployment docs.

If your server is behind a firewall, you'll need to open/forward port 8080, 8000 and 4318 on your firewall for the UI, API and OTel collector respectively.

We recommend at least 4GB of RAM and 2 cores for testing.

Hosted ClickHouse Cloud

You can also deploy ClickStack with ClickHouse Cloud, you can sign up for free and get started in just minutes.

Instrumenting Your App

To get logs, metrics, traces, session replay, etc into ClickStack, you'll need to instrument your app to collect and send telemetry data over to your ClickStack instance.

We provide a set of SDKs and integration options to make it easier to get started with ClickStack, such as Browser, Node.js, and Python

You can find the full list in our docs.

OpenTelemetry

Additionally, ClickStack is compatible with OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting your application backed by CNCF. Supported languages/platforms include:

  • Kubernetes
  • Javascript
  • Python
  • Java
  • Go
  • Ruby
  • PHP
  • .NET
  • Elixir
  • Rust

(Full list here)

Once ClickStack is running, you can point your OpenTelemetry SDK to the OpenTelemetry collector spun up at http://localhost:4318.

ClickStack CLI

Prefer the terminal? @hyperdx/cli provides an interactive TUI and CLI (hdx) for working with your ClickStack data without leaving the shell:

npm install -g @hyperdx/cli
hdx auth login
hdx tui
  • 🖥️ Interactive TUI — search, live tail, and trace waterfalls with vim-style keybindings
  • 📊 Render dashboard tiles and ad-hoc charts as ANSI output in the terminal
  • 🤖 Agent-friendly: raw SQL queries, NDJSON output, and Drain log pattern mining for scripts and AI agents

See the CLI README for the full command reference.

Contributing

We welcome all contributions! There's many ways to contribute to the project, including but not limited to:

Pull requests. Issues, bug reports and discussion stay open to everyone. For code we now use Vouch: a maintainer has to vouch for you before your first pull request gets reviewed. AI tools make it cheap to open a plausible-looking PR with no understanding behind it, and reviewing those crowds out the contributions we want to spend time on. There's nothing to request up front: open your first PR and a maintainer vouches for you on it. See Getting vouched.

Motivation

Our mission is to help engineers ship reliable software. To enable that, we believe every engineer needs to be able to easily leverage production telemetry to quickly solve burning production issues.

However, in our experience, the existing tools we've used tend to fall short in a few ways:

  1. They're expensive, and the pricing has failed to scale with TBs of telemetry becoming the norm, leading to teams aggressively cutting the amount of data they can collect.
  2. They're hard to use, requiring full-time SREs to set up, and domain experts to use confidently.
  3. They requiring hopping from tool to tool (logs, session replay, APM, exceptions, etc.) to stitch together the clues yourself.

We hope you give ClickStack a try and let us know how we're doing!

Contact

ClickStack Usage Data

ClickStack collects anonymized usage data for open source deployments. This data supports our mission for observability to be available to any team and helps support our open source product run in a variety of different environments. While we hope you will continue to support our mission in this way, you may opt out of usage data collection by setting the USAGE_STATS_ENABLED environment variable to false. Thank you for supporting the development of ClickStack!

License

MIT

Frequently asked questions

Is ClickStack free to use?

ClickStack is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does ClickStack do?

Resolve production issues, fast. An open source observability platform unifying session replays, logs, metrics, traces and errors powered by ClickHouse and Open

What is ClickStack written in?

ClickStack is primarily written in TypeScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickStack, and it has 9,997 GitHub stars.