How Critical Manufacturing uses ClickHouse to bring real-time intelligence to the factory floor

Critical Manufacturing, a Portugal-based company specializing in enterprise Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software, transitioned from Microsoft SQL Server to ClickHouse Cloud to enhance real-time analytics and operational intelligence. This shift was driven by the need to handle billions of shop-floor events rapidly and efficiently, offering sub-second insights crucial for high-tech manufacturers across various industries. By adopting ClickHouse, the company significantly improved data ingestion, storage, and querying capabilities, making it possible to manage a vast scale of data and deliver instant insights. The transition allowed the company to utilize ELT processes, ReplacingMergeTree for handling duplicates, and denormalization to optimize performance, while also leveraging ClickHouse for observability and AI workloads. The integration of ClickHouse has transformed Critical Manufacturing's data infrastructure, enabling scalable, cost-effective analytics and supporting continuous operations in a data-driven manufacturing environment. Looking ahead, the company aims to enhance the system's availability and resiliency with plans for multi-replica deployments and sharding as they continue to move workloads from legacy systems.