50.9kWe wanted something similar to Datadog, so that it's easy for engineers to ramp up to this new system with no steep learning curve. With ClickHouse, we see a compression ratio of 10x and a 200x increase in indexed logs. These logs are easily accessible to all engineers... And all of this came at a 0% increase in cost.
- Comparisons
- Observability
ClickHouse Observability vs Datadog
Retain everything. Sample nothing. Investigate without limits.
ClickHouse Observability combines ClickHouse performance with a turnkey, fully managed experience built on open standards. Retain full-fidelity telemetry, investigate with your own agents, and keep observability costs under control, with ingestion, storage, optimization, and scaling managed for you.
- Retain everything. Keep high-cardinality logs, traces, and metrics at low cost, preserving the detail engineers and agents need.
- Investigate without limits. Run human and AI-powered investigations in parallel, with fast queries, expressive SQL, and your choice of agents.
- Built on open standards. OpenTelemetry-native with SQL, open APIs, and the freedom to use your preferred models, tools, and workflows.
Trusted for observability by
We were sending 15% of our traffic to Datadog. Now we're sending 100% to ClickHouse Observability. For comparable workloads, it's roughly 15 to 20x cheaper for us to run ClickHouse than Datadog. It's been a great success story for us.
Why teams move from Datadog
As telemetry volumes and AI workloads grow, organizations need a platform that offers more predictable economics, greater openness, and the flexibility to build for the future.
Keep every signal
Retain high-cardinality telemetry for longer without sampling or roll-ups, preserving the context engineers and agents need to diagnose issues.
Simple volume-based pricing
Pay by uncompressed GB for logs, traces, and session replays, and by data points for metrics, with 30 days of retention included.
Built on open standards
OpenTelemetry-native, with SQL, open APIs, and the freedom to integrate with your existing tools, data platform, and workflows.
Query anything with SQL
Explore telemetry with expressive SQL and advanced analytics to compare historical patterns, correlate signals, and test unexpected hypotheses.
Built for AI, not just dashboards
Give your agents full-fidelity telemetry and purpose-built MCP tools to explore possible causes in parallel and reach answers sooner.
Lower observability costs
Keep more telemetry within your budget, with logs and traces on simple volume-based pricing.
An open stack for modern observability
ClickHouse Observability brings an open observability stack into a turnkey, fully managed experience, powered by open source ClickStack.
Keep your OpenTelemetry instrumentation and connect through SQL, open APIs, and MCP. Use your preferred dashboards, notebooks, models, and agents, while we manage ingestion, storage, optimization, and scaling.
Collaborate
AI Notebooks
Query
SQL & Lucene
Open APIs
API & CLI
Connect
MCP tools
Integrate
External tools
Alerts
Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks
AI Agents
Claude, Codex, OpenCode
ClickHouse Observability
Powered by open source ClickStack
Managed for you
Ingestion · Storage · Optimization · Scaling
Economics at scale
ClickHouse Observability makes full-fidelity telemetry affordable with straightforward volume-based pricing. Keep the detail and history your investigations need, with the platform fully managed.
Monthly log cost
Datadog StandardClickHouse Observability
Volume157 TB / monthLower costs. Better observability.
Datadog Standard
$408,200
Monthly at $2.60 / GB
ClickHouse Observability
$15,700
Monthly at $0.10 / GB, public beta
Estimated monthly savings
$392,500
x26 more cost efficient
at 157 TB / month
ClickHouse Observability public beta pricing.
Datadog Standard: $0.10 per GB ingested plus the equivalent indexing cost at 1 KB an event, from Datadog’s published pricing (opens in a new tab). Datadog also offers other log retention tiers, priced differently.
Illustrative log comparison with 30-day retention. Datadog assumes Standard indexing, annual list pricing, and 1 KB log events.
Sample nothing
Investigate production using full-fidelity telemetry without losing evidence to sampling or roll-ups.
Investigate in parallel
Let engineers and agents test multiple hypotheses at once with fast, concurrent queries.
Straightforward pricing as you grow
Estimate costs from telemetry volume, with clear rates for GB ingested and metric data points.
Lower costs. Simpler pricing.
Understand what drives your bill. Logs, traces, and session replays are priced by the uncompressed data you send. Metrics are priced by data points, with no separate cardinality charge.
ClickHouse Observability
Two clear ingestion units
Logs, traces, and session replays
Per uncompressed GB ingested
$0.10 / GBGA rate $0.20
Metrics
Per million data points ingested
$0.05 / millionGA rate $0.10
30 days of retention included · No monthly minimum
Datadog
Multiple products. Different billing units.
- Infrastructure monitoringPer host
- Container monitoringPer container
- Log ingestionPer GB
- Log indexingPer million events
- Flex LogsPer million stored events
- APMPer host
- Span ingestionPer GB
- Span indexingPer million spans
- Custom metricsPer 100 metrics on cardinality-based plans
- Session replayPer 1,000 sessions
- Real user monitoringPer 1,000 sessions
- Database monitoringPer host
- Network monitoringPer host
- Network device monitoringPer device
- Continuous profilerPer host
- Serverless monitoringPer function
- Synthetic API testsPer 10,000 runs
- Synthetic browser testsPer 1,000 runs
- Cloud SIEMPer GB analyzed
- Log rehydrationPer GB scanned
- Observability pipelinesPer GB
- CI visibilityPer committer
- Incident managementPer user
- AI creditsPer credit
100+ pricing line items across the platform (opens in a new tab)
Forecast ingestion costs from telemetry volume, so your team can spend more time investigating and less time working through pricing combinations.
Built for AI-powered investigations
ClickHouse Observability gives agents full-fidelity telemetry, fast concurrent queries, and purpose-built tools to investigate failures in parallel and surface evidence your team can review.
claude-code — ~/incident-1247
Observability data is business data
- Investigate with SQL.
Compare historical patterns and test complex hypotheses with expressive SQL, beyond predefined queries and workflows. - Understand what changed and who was affected.
Correlate services, deployments, requests, and customer identifiers to identify regressions and assess their impact. - Use a broader open data ecosystem.
Explore telemetry with your preferred BI tools, Python notebooks, and data science frameworks.
SELECT
failures.ContainerId as ContainerId,
failures.Timestamp AS FailureTime,
recoveries.Timestamp AS RecoveryTime,
dateDiff(second, failures.Timestamp, recoveries.Timestamp) AS RecoverySeconds
FROM
events AS failures
ASOF LEFT JOIN
kube_events AS recoveries
ON failures.ContainerId = recoveries.ContainerId
AND failures.Timestamp < recoveries.Timestamp
WHERE
failures.Message LIKE 'exited abnormally%'
AND recoveries.EventType = 'ContainerReady'
ORDER BY
failures.ContainerId,
failures.Timestamp;Migrations made simple
Moving from Datadog doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Send telemetry from your existing Datadog agents to the managed Datadog receiver endpoint in ClickHouse Observability while keeping Datadog running. Compare searches, dashboards, investigations, and costs side by side, then transition workloads at your own pace.
Evaluate side by side
- Validate dashboards
- Migrate workflows
- Run AI investigations
- Compare query performance
- Evaluate cost efficiency
- Migrate when ready
ClickHouse Observability compared to Datadog
Modern observability demands more than proprietary workflows. As telemetry volumes grow and AI becomes central to every investigation, organizations need an open platform that retains complete data, scales economically, and can serve ever-increasing query workloads.
ClickHouse Observability
Straightforward GB and data-point pricing
Billed by data points, with no separate cardinality charge
Native
Months or years at low cost (self-managed ClickHouse Observability)
No sampling required
ClickHouse SQL and Lucene-style search
Bring your own models, agents, and MCP servers
No API rate limits on telemetry queries
Full-fidelity logs, metrics, traces, and session replays
Open APIs and ecosystem, powered by open source ClickStack
Managed scaling for growing telemetry and concurrent investigations
Multiple pricing dimensions and SKUs across hosts, ingestion, indexing, retention, and additional capabilities1
Cardinality-based plans charge per 100 custom time series above included allowances; high-cardinality tags can increase costs2
Supported
Standard and Flex retention tiers, with different pricing and capabilities3
Often used to control costs, alongside selective indexing and retention policies
Proprietary query languages and query interfaces
Vendor-centric Bits AI experience, with external-agent access through MCP
Endpoint-specific API rate limits, plus MCP burst limits and monthly tool-call allowances4
Logs, metrics, traces, and session replay, with product-specific pricing and retention
Proprietary platform with APIs and integrations
Managed scaling across products with different billing dimensions
- 1
Datadog’s public price list has more than 100 line items, including plan and retention variants; which apply depends on the products and configuration selected.
- 2
A custom time series is a metric name with its tag values, including the host; Datadog also offers optional Metric Name pricing based on metric names and data points.
- 3
Datadog separates Standard indexing from Flex storage and querying, so retention and access capabilities are chosen by tier.
- 4
Datadog's API rate limits are set per endpoint; its MCP Server documents burst limits and monthly tool-call allowances.
Migrate your workload from Datadog today
Retain full-fidelity telemetry, investigate with your own agents, and keep costs under control with ClickHouse Observability, powered by open source ClickStack and fully managed for you.
FAQs
We're here to make observability simple, fast, and open. Explore our FAQs to learn more about ClickHouse Observability, and if you don't see what you need, we're always happy to chat.
01
ClickHouse Observability is the turnkey, fully managed observability solution for SREs and their agents, powered by open source ClickStack. Investigate full-fidelity logs, metrics, traces, and session replays with ingestion, schemas, storage, optimization, and scaling managed for you.
02
ClickHouse Observability combines affordable retention, fast concurrent queries, and straightforward volume-based pricing. Keep unsampled telemetry and high-cardinality context, investigate with expressive SQL, and connect your preferred agents through MCP with no API limits.
03
ClickHouse Observability is fully managed. We handle ingestion, schemas, the database, storage, and scaling. Just send telemetry to your managed OpenTelemetry endpoint, investigate in the ClickStack UI, or connect your agents through MCP. Pricing is volume-based: on the Scale plan, list prices are $0.20 per uncompressed GB for logs, traces, and session replays and $0.10 per million metric data points. The 50% beta discount reduces these to $0.10 per GB and $0.05 per million data points. Pricing details.
Self-managed ClickHouse Observability, formerly Managed ClickStack, gives you control over database configuration and capacity. You manage your collector, schemas, compute sizing and scaling, and read/write isolation using warehouse services, tuning the deployment as your workload changes. ClickHouse Cloud still operates the underlying infrastructure. You pay for compute and storage resources under standard ClickHouse Cloud pricing, rather than telemetry ingested.
04
During public beta, logs, traces, and session replays cost $0.10 per uncompressed GB ingested. Metrics cost $0.05 per million data points, with no separate cardinality charge. Both include 30 days of retention, with no monthly minimum. See the pricing page for current rates and search allowances.
05
Our illustrative log comparison shows a 26× price difference: $0.10/GB for ClickHouse Observability during public beta versus $2.60/GB for Datadog Standard. This assumes 30-day retention, annual Datadog list pricing, and an average log event size of 1 KB. Actual savings depend on your workload, usage, and contract terms.
06
Yes. Send telemetry from your existing Datadog agents to the managed Datadog receiver endpoint in ClickHouse Observability while continuing to use Datadog. Compare searches, dashboards, investigations, and costs side by side, then transition workloads at your own pace.
07
Yes. ClickHouse Observability is OpenTelemetry-native and accepts logs, metrics, and traces through a managed endpoint. Use standard OpenTelemetry SDKs and collectors to send your telemetry.
08
Yes. Existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation can send data to the managed endpoint by updating its exporter configuration. Teams using Datadog agents can use the managed Datadog receiver endpoint without first replacing their application instrumentation.
09
Yes. Connect your preferred MCP-compatible agents or use SQL directly. Bring your choice of models, frameworks, and operational context, including code and runbooks, into investigations with ClickHouse Observability.
10
Full-fidelity telemetry gives agents detailed production evidence, while fast concurrent queries and no API limits let them test hypotheses in parallel. Purpose-built MCP tools support log search, trace waterfalls, event patterns, and event deltas. Shared AI notebooks keep queries, findings, and conclusions available for engineers to review and continue.
11
Yes. ClickHouse Observability brings these signals into a common investigation experience. Search logs, follow requests across services, examine metric changes, and use session replay to understand what a user experienced.
12
ClickStack is the open source observability stack that powers ClickHouse Observability. The managed product gives you the familiar ClickStack UI with ingestion, storage, optimization, and scaling handled for you. ClickStack remains available for teams that want to run the stack themselves.
13
We manage ingestion, schemas, storage, optimization, scaling, and the underlying infrastructure, including backups, upgrades, and maintenance. Your team can focus on investigating production systems rather than administering an observability platform.
14
Most teams should choose the default turnkey experience. For engineering teams with database expertise seeking the lowest possible unit costs, ClickHouse Observability also offers a self-managed experience. You configure and optimize the database while ClickHouse Cloud manages the infrastructure. Teams that want to operate the entire stack themselves can use open source ClickStack.
