How Mercado Libre rebuilt its observability platform on ClickHouse Cloud with 50x faster trace queries

Mercado Libre, a leading Latin American commerce and fintech platform, has significantly enhanced its observability capabilities by migrating its O11y events platform to ClickHouse Cloud, resulting in a 50x increase in query performance and up to 89% data compression. This migration enables the company to efficiently handle massive data volumes, scaling from 7 million spans per minute to 400 million, and provides high-cardinality filtering for identifiers like payment and user IDs. The platform, built on OpenTelemetry, offers end-to-end visibility of business flows, allowing for rapid troubleshooting and improved customer experience. At the Open House SF 2026 event, technical leader Daniel Da Rosa and software expert Francislei Reis highlighted the importance of tracing for comprehensive request views and process optimization. They shared insights into the architecture shift that moved heavy data operations into ClickHouse, leveraging materialized views and a dedicated lookup table to solve high-cardinality filtering challenges. The migration lessons emphasized the importance of profiling, benchmarking, iterative index design, and segmenting storage and compute clusters. Looking forward, Mercado Libre plans to enhance its observability platform with AI telemetry, proactive insights, and semantic queries, aiming for a future where observability transcends traditional dashboards.

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