How Uken Games reduces observability costs by 87% with ClickHouse

Uken Games, a Toronto-based mobile game studio serving millions of players, replaced Datadog with an observability stack centered on ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, SigNoz, managed Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch, cutting annual monitoring costs by 87% to about $12,000. The company distinguishes product analytics, which measures engagement and retention, from technical observability, which tracks infrastructure performance, errors, and latency across hundreds of containers, machines, disks, databases, and service deployments. Its new vendor-agnostic trace pipeline uses lightweight OpenTelemetry agents on ECS instances and scalable gateway collectors to filter, batch, and send data through SigNoz to a single ClickHouse node, which stores all traces in roughly 170 GB. Uken retained CloudWatch for logs, used AWS-managed Prometheus for metrics, and automated Grafana alerts through code, enabling hundreds of alerts and frequent queries across its systems. The migration also prompted the team to reduce unnecessary telemetry by retaining errors and slow requests, sampling successful traces, basing alerts on unsampled aggregate metrics, and limiting retention to two weeks, while achieving feature parity with its former platform without downtime.

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