Shopify powers observability for global-scale commerce with ClickHouse

Shopify replaced separate metrics, logs, and tracing vendors with Observe, an internally built observability platform powered by self-hosted ClickHouse that unifies metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and exceptions. Designed to support a global infrastructure of roughly 500 Kubernetes clusters and 1.5 million pods, the platform ingests about 50 million events per second normally and up to 100 million during Black Friday–Cyber Monday, while making telemetry queryable in under a minute. Shopify reported a 16-fold out-of-the-box query-performance improvement with ClickHouse, exceeding 30-fold at peak, while gaining more predictable costs and control over its technology roadmap. To manage durability, flexible schemas, correlations, and ongoing migrations, the team uses Kafka buffering, materialized views, typed columns, metadata indexes, and an in-house Kubernetes operator, alongside compression and storage optimizations. Shopify is now expanding ClickHouse use into continuous profiling, AI-assisted internal analysis, and merchant-facing analytics, although its engineering director said that, if starting today, the company would likely consider ClickHouse Cloud to reduce the operational burden of self-hosting.

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