ChartMogul’s Seamless Migration to Altinity.Cloud BYOC for ClickHouse®
About the company
ChartMogul is a subscription analytics and CRM platform tailored for subscription-based businesses. It simplifies tracking key SaaS metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Average Sale Price (ASP), churn, and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) through intuitive, visually appealing dashboards.
Behind the scenes, ClickHouse® plays a crucial role in enabling ChartMogul’s fast and efficient data processing, ensuring that businesses can analyze large-scale subscription data with minimal latency. This allows users to quickly segment customers, identify revenue trends, and make data-driven decisions.
Why ClickHouse?
Initially, they relied on PostgreSQL but found that it struggled with complex aggregations which were used to create large-scale reporting across various customer datasets. As bigger customers were onboarded, they began to search for a high-performance data warehouse.
The team tested multiple solutions, including Snowflake and ClickHouse. While Snowflake was a consideration, they found its latency unpredictable. ClickHouse proved to be a better fit, providing faster query execution, and, as a bonus, an active open source community. With a small DevOps team, they originally selected another vendor than Altinity as their managed service for ClickHouse.
Challenge: The Need for a New Solution
ChartMogul was happy with their initial choice, but in October 2024 that vendor announced it was shutting down. ChartMogul had to find a new ClickHouse hosting solution—fast. After evaluating their options, they selected Altinity.Cloud’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) for ClickHouse model.
Why BYOC for ClickHouse? A Strategic Choice for Compliance and Control
The team opted for Altinity’s BYOC model, which allows them to deploy ClickHouse within their own cloud environment. This decision was driven by several factors, including:
- 100% Open Source ClickHouse Compatibility: Altinity runs 100% open source ClickHouse in their cloud, ensuring full flexibility and access to open source features (e.g., Kafka Table Engine, backup/restore, etc).
- Compliance & Security: BYOC allowed them to maintain full control over their data while leveraging Altinity’s managed services and support.
- Operational Efficiency with a Small DevOps Team: They had a lean DevOps team that could manage some aspects of infrastructure but didn’t want the burden of full self-hosting. Altinity’s BYOC model struck the right balance.
- Best-in-Class Support & Documentation: Support for ClickHouse was a very important consideration for the team. They emphasized that even before becoming customers, Altinity was already a trusted resource, with its documentation, blogs, webinars, and knowledge base serving as go-to resources.
- Performant Database: Early tests showed that queries in Altinity.Cloud were significantly faster than the previous vendor. In production, median query performance improved by 40%, and the 95th percentile query speed improved by 25%.
The Migration to Altinity.Cloud BYOC for ClickHouse: Fast, Smooth, and Reliable
With the help of Altinity’s support team, the migration was completed within a single day, with a one-month testing period to ensure data integrity. The largest table contained 500 million rows, with backups totaling a few hundred GBs—approximately 600 GiB uncompressed.
- Data was first backed up to Amazon S3 before being restored to Altinity’s BYOC ClickHouse environment.
- The ChartMogul team conducted rigorous testing to ensure there were no discrepancies in data.
- Altinity’s engineers provided real-time Slack support, resolving any migration-related questions efficiently.
- ChartMogul faced no major disruptions to operations during migration.
I remember one question we had was about restoring data because we had three replicas. There were some doubts on how to restore the data to those three replicas, specifically whether to use ClickHouse’s onCluster method or not. With any uncertainties [during the migration] Altinity’s team was there to help, providing the guidance we needed to ensure everything went smoothly.
The Outcome: Faster Performance
Since migrating to Altinity’s BYOC for ClickHouse, ChartMogul has experienced:
- Zero incidents or downtime (compared to previous issues due to lack of administrative actions with the previous vendor)
- 40% faster median query times and 25% faster 95th percentile queries
- Great ClickHouse support experience
We were testing one query on our previous vendor and the same query on Altinity, and Altinity was much faster. I have no idea why. So we thought, okay, this is fast, but let’s see if it holds up in a production environment. And in production, it remained quite a bit faster. Looking at our reports and calculations, we saw around a 40% improvement in median response time, which is a lot. At the 95th percentile, there was about a 25% improvement. It was really a big difference.
Final Thoughts
Altinity provided ChartMogul with the support needed for a smooth migration. With Altinity’s BYOC for ClickHouse model, ChartMogul now benefits from a solution that offers both control and flexibility, allowing them to confidently scale their analytics operations while focusing on delivering value to their customers.
With Altinity, you’re with a more mature company. The support is great, and improved performance is a nice bonus. We can really feel that the people there have a deep knowledge of ClickHouse and how it works—there’s a high level of technical proficiency.
ClickHouse® is a registered trademark of ClickHouse, Inc.; Altinity is not affiliated with or associated with ClickHouse, Inc.