ClickVisual is a lightweight, browser-based log analytics and log search platform for ClickHouse, aimed at teams that already store their logs in ClickHouse and want querying, dashboards, and alerting without operating a full Elasticsearch stack.

What it is

ClickVisual is a Go application, released under the MIT licence, that puts a browser UI in front of a ClickHouse database so that logs can be searched, charted, and alarmed on. It ships with visual query dashboards, a SQL query interface that returns a histogram alongside raw log lines, per-field percentage breakdowns, and an alarm workflow, all served from a single binary on port 19001. The project originates from the team at @ShimoDocs and is documented at clickvisual.net.

The concrete problem it solves is the gap between ClickHouse's raw query speed and the day-to-day ergonomics that log users expect from a Kibana-style interface. ClickHouse is fast and cheap for log storage, but it offers no log search UI, no saved dashboards, no alerting, and no ingestion configuration management on its own. Topics for the project list both elk and kibana, which places it squarely in the ELK-replacement conversation: instead of running Elasticsearch and Kibana, a team keeps ClickHouse and adds ClickVisual as the query, visualization, and alert layer on top.

Key capabilities

• Visual query dashboard with a SQL query histogram and raw log output for the same query.
• Percentage display for specified fields, for breakdowns within a result set.
• VSCode-style configuration board that emits fluent-bit configuration into a Kubernetes ConfigMap.
• Out-of-the-box deployment path through kubectl.
• Alarm workflow, demonstrated in the project's alarm process walkthrough.
• DAG workflow support, shown in the project documentation.
• Authentication through GitHub and GitLab.

Who uses it and how

• Teams already running ClickHouse as their log store, who need search and dashboards without adding Elasticsearch to the cluster.
• Kubernetes operators, since the configuration board writes fluent-bit settings straight into a ConfigMap and the project documents a kubectl deployment path.
• On-call and platform engineers who want alarm rules attached to log queries rather than to a separate monitoring system.
• Organisations using GitHub or GitLab as their identity source, which ClickVisual accepts directly for login.
• Document contributors working on the clickvisual.net site through the docs directory in the repository.

Getting started

Clone the repository and run docker-compose up, then visit http://localhost:19001 and log in with the default credentials clickvisual / clickvisual. Host installs follow the release tarball route: unpack clickvisual-${latest}-linux-amd64.tar.gz, edit config/default.toml for database and Redis settings, run the migration SQL in scripts/migration, and start with ./clickvisual -config config/default.toml. The clickvisual image is also available on Docker Hub.

How it compares

Among the tools named in its own topic list, ClickVisual sits against ELK and Kibana as the lighter alternative: MIT-licensed rather than partly proprietary, self-hosted by design, and with the log data staying in the operator's own ClickHouse instance. The trade-off is that Kibana brings a far larger plugin ecosystem and vendor backing, while ClickVisual brings a much smaller footprint and no Elasticsearch cluster to size, tune, or pay for.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must operate ClickHouse itself, plus a database and Redis as referenced in config/default.toml, and must apply the migration scripts in scripts/migration before first start. Anyone without existing ClickHouse logs gains little here, and teams needing a managed, supported product with an SLA should look elsewhere, because the facts show no hosted offering. The honest weakness is maturity signals: 56 open issues, 9 contributors, and a README that is short enough to leave much of the operational detail to the external documentation site.

# clone clickvisual source code.
git clone https://github.com/clickvisual/clickvisual.git

# you may need to set docker image mirror, visit <https://github.com/yeasy/docker_practice/blob/master/install/mirror.md> for details.
docker-compose up

# then go to browser and visit http://localhost:19001.
# login username: clickvisual 
# login password: clickvisual

# download release.
# get latest version.
latest=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/clickvisual/clickvisual/releases/latest | grep  ".tag_name" | sed -E 's/.*"([^"]+)".*/\1/')

# for MacOS amd64.
wget "https://github.com/clickvisual/clickvisual/releases/download/${latest}/clickvisual-${latest}-darwin-amd64.tar.gz" -O clickvisual-${latest}.tar.gz

# for Linux amd64.
wget "https://github.com/clickvisual/clickvisual/releases/download/${latest}/clickvisual-${latest}-linux-amd64.tar.gz" -O clickvisual-${latest}.tar.gz

# extract zip file to current directory.
mkdir -p ./clickvisual-${latest} && tar -zxvf clickvisual-${latest}.tar.gz -C ./clickvisual-${latest}

# open config/default.toml, then change database and redis or other section configuration
# execute migration latest sql script in scripts/migration directory
# start clickvisual
cd ./clickvisual-${latest} && ./clickvisual -config config/default.toml

# then go to browser and visit http://localhost:19001
# login username: clickvisual
# login password: clickvisual