FOSSY 2026 – O11y in One: Exploring ClickHouse® as a Unified Telemetry Database

Conference Talk

FOSSY 2026 – O11y in One: Exploring ClickHouse® as a Unified Telemetry Database

OpenTelemetry is often introduced as a way to send your metrics, traces, and logs to separate backend databases. But in reality, most organizations juggle at least half a dozen monitoring tools in production. What we really need isn’t just a standardized way to collect telemetry—it’s a unified datastore that brings all the backends together, much like how OpenTelemetry has a unified telemetry collection. Could ClickHouse be that solution?

In this talk, Joshua will dive into the fundamental nature of telemetry and explore what we truly need from a unified telemetry datastore. He’ll break down the specific features of ClickHouse that make it an exceptional choice for tracing and logs today—and hint at its growing potential for time-series data in the future. From there, he’ll highlight the seamless integrations between ClickHouse and open-source tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Kafka, showcasing how these technologies work together to enhance observability pipelines.

Finally, we’ll take a closer look at cutting-edge, open-source observability platforms built on ClickHouse, including CoRoot, QRYN, and SigNoz. Whether you’re building a complete observability platform or exploring how to simplify your own observability strategy, this session will equip you with insights into leveraging ClickHouse as a core part of your telemetry infrastructure. Join us to learn how to move beyond fragmented tools and unlock the power of unified observability.

About the Presenters

Joshua Lee – Open Source Developer Advocate at Altinity

Whether it’s operators or observability, agile or accessibility, his expertise shines because he is passionate about all of it. He’s been building software for more than a decade and he loves sharing experiences via public speaking. He is currently a Developer Advocate for Altinity where he helps create educational content about ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry, and he is a contributor to the OpenTelemetry project.