Goodbye limitations, hello data: How Qonto is rethinking observability with ClickHouse Cloud

Qonto, a digital bank serving over 600,000 small businesses and freelancers in eight European countries, transitioned to ClickHouse Cloud to enhance observability across its banking platform, switching from Grafana Tempo to address limitations in querying and data compression. ClickHouse's ability to extend query windows and compress data significantly reduced storage costs and enabled real-time insights without sampling constraints. This shift allowed Qonto to adopt a more flexible approach to incident investigation, leveraging an AI companion powered by the ClickHouse MCP server to analyze incidents in plain English, leading to more efficient and democratized incident response. The integration of ClickHouse facilitated collaboration between observability and data engineering teams, enabling them to explore real-time data processing and pre-aggregation pipelines. This move marked a philosophical shift in Qonto's approach to observability, treating it as a holistic data problem and opening up new avenues for product teams to understand user behavior and feature adoption, all while reducing the need for protecting infrastructure and empowering teams to innovate using ClickHouse's capabilities.