ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry

Earlier this year, the team at ClickHouse decided to start officially supporting and contributing to the OpenTelemetry exporter for ClickHouse, which has recently graduated to beta for both the logging and tracing (the highest level in the OTel exporter ecosystem at the moment). In this post, we wanted to use this milestone as an opportunity to highlight the OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse integration.

OpenTelemetry (OTel for short) is an open-source framework from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that enables the standardized collection, processing, and export of telemetry data. Structured around the main observability pillars (traces, metrics, and logs), OTel provides a unified, vendor-neutral approach, allowing developers and operations teams to gain insights into system health and diagnose issues in distributed systems.

OTel also provides instrumentation libraries for multiple languages, which automate data gathering with minimal code changes. An OTel Collector manages this data flow, acting as a gateway to export telemetry data to various backend platforms. By offering a consistent observability standard, OTel helps teams collect telemetry data efficiently and gain insights into complex systems.

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