If you're using the Grafana Clickhouse plugin - a number of things we do differently to them today:
- We support Lucene-based search, which means it's a lot easier to find the events you're looking for without needing to break into verbose SQL search. (Column/property/full text search are all super easy).
- We're optimized exclusively for Clickhouse, which means we do a number of things to optimize the queries we run and that returns you a nice performance boost (we see a 2x perf boost, but this will vary a ton of data and queries). For example we allow you to do a search on a subset of columns (so the search is performant), and then click in and expand an entire row of interest on-demand (so we only do a SELECT * for a single row). This is also a much nicer DX than needing to specify every column you might need. We have a few other optimizations as well.
- We have (what we think is) a nice chart builder - so you don't need to mess with template variables and macros to build a chart, but still lets you escape hatch out into SQL for the important bits.
- We think our event deltas feature for analyzing traces is pretty neat - afaik this isn't something you get in Grafana.
- You can live tail events, I don't think Grafana for Clickhouse has that (I'm a big fan of tail -f)
Overall we focus on trying to bring an easy-to-use high-cardinality observability experience to Clickhouse, whereas Grafana seems to focus more on a highly SQL-dependent dashboard building experience (which has its own advantages of course).
Yup! We're agnostic to the storage medium underneath as Clickhouse's interface doesn't change based on the disk layout backing the table. In our hosted version we use S3 as well.
- We support Lucene-based search, which means it's a lot easier to find the events you're looking for without needing to break into verbose SQL search. (Column/property/full text search are all super easy).
- We're optimized exclusively for Clickhouse, which means we do a number of things to optimize the queries we run and that returns you a nice performance boost (we see a 2x perf boost, but this will vary a ton of data and queries). For example we allow you to do a search on a subset of columns (so the search is performant), and then click in and expand an entire row of interest on-demand (so we only do a SELECT * for a single row). This is also a much nicer DX than needing to specify every column you might need. We have a few other optimizations as well.
- We have (what we think is) a nice chart builder - so you don't need to mess with template variables and macros to build a chart, but still lets you escape hatch out into SQL for the important bits.
- We think our event deltas feature for analyzing traces is pretty neat - afaik this isn't something you get in Grafana. - You can live tail events, I don't think Grafana for Clickhouse has that (I'm a big fan of tail -f)
Overall we focus on trying to bring an easy-to-use high-cardinality observability experience to Clickhouse, whereas Grafana seems to focus more on a highly SQL-dependent dashboard building experience (which has its own advantages of course).
edit: fixed line breaks!