Company
Date Published
Author
Sentry
Word count
1478
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Sentry has introduced a new search infrastructure called Snuba, which is built on top of ClickHouse, an open-source column-oriented database management system. Snuba powers Sentry's primary storage and query service for event data and provides features such as search, graphs, issue detail pages, rule processing queries, and more. The need for Snuba arose from Sentry's growth and the increasing complexity of its data model, which required a flat event model that can be queried ad-hoc without denormalization. ClickHouse was chosen over other OLAP systems due to its open-source nature, operational simplicity, row-level sorting, real-time querying capabilities, and PREWHERE clause. Snuba abstracts ClickHouse away from Sentry and provides a rich query interface through a Flask web service, which hides underlying complexity from application developers. The system uses Kafka for event processing, batch writes to ClickHouse, and Redis for caching individual query results.