How we Built a 19 PiB Logging Platform with ClickHouse and Saved Millions

In this article, we discussed how ClickHouse was used to build an observability platform that handles over 19 petabytes of data. The architecture and key technical decisions behind the platform were reviewed, including the use of OpenTelemetry for collection and aggregation, a custom Grafana plugin for log exploration, and cross-region querying. We also demonstrated that ClickHouse is at least 200x less expensive than Datadog for an observability workload like ours - the projected cost of Datadog for a 30-day retention period having been a staggering ~$26M per month!