ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source framework from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that enables standardized collection, processing, and export of telemetry data. It supports multiple languages and provides instrumentation libraries for efficient observability in complex systems. The vendor-neutral approach allows teams to avoid lock-in with any single monitoring tool and switch between or combine different observability backends as needed. ClickHouse has decided to officially support and contribute to the OpenTelemetry exporter, which is now in beta for both logging and tracing. This integration helps teams collect telemetry data efficiently and gain insights into complex systems using SQL-based observability tools like ClickHouse. The OTel collector gathers telemetry data from SDKs or other sources and forwards it to supported backends, such as ClickHouse. The default schema provided by the OpenTelemetry exporter for logs, traces, and metrics is suitable for most common telemetry use cases. However, if users need a significantly different schema, they can create their own table schemas or use a ClickHouse materialized view to modify the existing ones. It's recommended to disable default table creation in production deployments to avoid conflicts between multiple exporter processes. The OpenTelemetry community encourages contributions from users and developers, including feedback, bug reports, feature suggestions, code improvements, and documentation updates. Contributions can directly impact and shape the future of observability tools like OTel+ClickHouse.