HyperDX

HyperDX: Unified Telemetry for Modern ClickHouse Observability

Introduction

HyperDX sits at the crossroads of logs, traces, metrics, and user behavior to deliver a streamlined, powerful observability experience on top of ClickHouse. It is designed for engineers who need to move quickly when production systems misbehave, without being dragged into complex toolchains or nested dashboards. Built as a core component of ClickStack, HyperDX brings together search, visualization, and correlation in one place, enabling you to understand exactly why production is broken and how to fix it—fast.

What HyperDX Does for You

HyperDX is specifically crafted to maximize the speed and clarity with which you can diagnose production issues. It is described as a “Kibana-for-ClickHouse” experience, but with a twist: it is fully schema-agnostic, optimized for ClickHouse, and designed to work seamlessly with standard telemetry data types. The platform lets you correlate logs, metrics, session replays, and traces in a single pane, cutting down the friction of switching between separate tools. This comprehensive approach is especially valuable in environments where data volume is high and the ability to pinpoint anomalies quickly translates into tangible reliability gains.

Key Highlights and Capabilities

Correlate and search across logs, metrics, session replays, and traces in one unified interface
Schema-agnostic operation: works on top of your existing ClickHouse schema without requiring a rigid data model
Blazing-fast searches and visualizations tailored for ClickHouse performance
Intuitive full-text search combined with property search syntax (for example, level:err)
Optional SQL interface: you can lean on SQL if you prefer, or use the powerful search syntax for rapid investigations
Analyze trends in anomalies using event deltas to spot evolving failure patterns
Simple, user-friendly alerting: configure alerts in just a few clicks to catch issues in real time
High-cardinality event dashboards without wrestling with complex query languages
Native JSON string querying to handle semi-structured data within a familiar paradigm
Live tail: stream the freshest logs and traces to stay in the loop as events unfold
OpenTelemetry compatibility: out-of-the-box support for standard instrumentation
Application performance monitoring (APM) coverage across HTTP requests to database queries
Health and performance monitoring across the stack, giving you visibility into end-to-end latency

Visual Emphasis: A Visual Snapshot Search logs and traces all in one place

The Spinning Up Experience: Getting HyperDX Running

HyperDX can be deployed as part of ClickStack, a holistic observability bundle for ClickHouse. ClickStack includes:

ClickHouse (the database)
HyperDX (the observability layer)
OpenTelemetry Collector (the data pipeline)
MongoDB (for supplementary storage or metadata)

A typical local deployment can be started with a single command:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 docker.hyperdx.io/hyperdx/hyperdx-all-in-one

Once the container is up, you can access the HyperDX user interface by pointing your browser to http://localhost:8080. This provides a self-contained environment suitable for exploration, learning, and development. For production-grade deployments, or if you want to leverage existing ClickHouse infrastructures, there are deployment options and detailed guidance in the deployment documentation linked from the HyperDX and ClickHouse resources.

Deployment Options and Considerations

Local experimentation: The all-in-one container is ideal for a quick start, exploration, and testing in a local environment. It helps you understand how the HyperDX experience feels and what data you want to ingest.
Production-grade deployments: For production systems, you’ll want to refer to the deployment guide to tailor HyperDX alongside your existing ClickHouse deployment. The docs cover considerations such as network topology, resource planning, and security configurations.
Firewall and networking: If your server sits behind a firewall, you’ll need to open or forward ports 8080 (UI), 8000 (API), and 4318 (OTel collector) to ensure all components communicate correctly.
Resource recommendations: For testing, a minimum of 4 GB RAM and 2 CPU cores is suggested. In production, you’ll scale resources in line with data volume, ingestion rates, and the breadth of telemetry you’re collecting.

Hosted Option: ClickHouse Cloud

If you prefer a managed approach, HyperDX supports deployment with ClickHouse Cloud. You can sign up for free and begin in minutes, taking advantage of a managed ClickHouse environment while still benefiting from HyperDX’s unified telemetry capabilities. This path reduces operational overhead and aligns with teams looking to minimize self-managed infrastructure while retaining robust observability.

Instrumenting Your App: Bringing Telemetry into HyperDX

HyperDX relies on instrumentation to collect and forward telemetry data. The ecosystem includes a variety of SDKs and integration options designed to simplify integration and accelerate time-to-value. Core instrumentation pathways include:

Browser instrumentation: for frontend telemetry
Node.js instrumentation: for server-side JavaScript environments
Python instrumentation: for Python-based services

OpenTelemetry Compatibility

HyperDX is compatible with OpenTelemetry, the vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting applications, backed by the CNCF. This compatibility ensures you can leverage a wide variety of language bindings and tools to generate telemetry without sacrificing interoperability. Supported languages and platforms include:

Kubernetes environments
JavaScript
Python
Java
Go
Ruby
PHP
.NET
Elixir
Rust
(Full list of supported instrumentation is available through OpenTelemetry)

Operational workflow after starting HyperDX

Run the OpenTelemetry collector alongside your applications
Point your OpenTelemetry SDKs to the collector endpoint (for example, http://localhost:4318)
Begin ingesting traces, logs, metrics, and other telemetry into HyperDX
Use the unified UI to search, correlate, visualize, and alert on issues

OpenTelemetry: A Closer Look

OpenTelemetry offers vendor-neutral instrumentation, enabling you to instrument services without locking you into a specific vendor’s tooling. HyperDX leverages this ecosystem to collect and centralize telemetry data, ensuring a broad reach across your stack. The data you collect can include:

Trace data that reveals request paths and latency
Logs that provide contextual detail for errors and events
Metrics that quantify performance characteristics and system health
JSON data embedded in logs or events that can be queried natively

Contributing to HyperDX

HyperDX is a project that welcomes contributions from a broad community. There are multiple pathways to contribute beyond code:

Submitting feature requests or bug reports via GitHub issues
Opening pull requests to propose enhancements or fixes
Improving documentation, onboarding, and usage guides
Participating in discussions and helping shape project direction If you’re considering contributing, the project provides a Contributor Guide and a clear set of norms to help you get started. Engaging with the project not only helps strengthen the tool but also gives you a chance to influence the observability landscape where ClickHouse users operate.

Motivation: Why HyperDX Exists

The core motivation behind HyperDX stems from real-world needs observed by engineers building reliable software. The mission statement centers on giving every engineer the ability to leverage production telemetry to diagnose and solve issues quickly, without being forced into expensive, hard-to-use tools. The impetus for HyperDX includes:

Reducing cost pressure and scale constraints associated with telemetry data
Lowering the barrier to entry so SREs and engineers can operate effectively without specialized, deep-domain expertise
Eliminating the friction of hopping between disparate tools (logs, APM, session replays, exceptions) to synthesize clues into a coherent diagnosis

This philosophy underpins HyperDX’s design choices: a unified interface, schema-agnostic ingestion, fast and accessible searches, and straightforward alerting and dashboards tailored for high-cardinality data environments.

Usage Data and Privacy: What You Should Know

HyperDX collects anonymized usage data for open-source deployments. This telemetry supports the project’s mission to improve observability and ensure the product can run across a variety of environments. If you prefer not to participate in usage data collection, you can opt out by setting the environment variable USAGESTATSENABLED to false. This opt-out mechanism provides a clear privacy choice while preserving the benefits of usage insights for those who opt in.

Opt-out: USAGESTATSENABLED=false
Purpose: to support observability improvements and product development
Privacy: anonymized usage data collection

Licensing

HyperDX is distributed under the MIT license. This permissive license supports broad adoption and collaboration across projects, enabling organizations to build on top of HyperDX, extend its capabilities, and integrate with other components of their observability stack.

Practical Scenarios: How Teams Benefit

Incident response: During an outage, teams can quickly pivot between logs, traces, and metrics to understand a failure chain, identify the root cause, and verify remediation.
Performance optimization: By correlating traces with logs and metrics, teams can detect slow database queries, misconfigured services, or heavy-load events that degrade user experiences.
Debugging at scale: High-cardinality events, anomalies, and deltas help identify recurring issues and trends without wrestling with brittle, bespoke queries.
Observability as code: With OpenTelemetry instrumentation and a consistent data model on ClickHouse, teams can codify observability practices and reuse instrumentation across services.

User Experience and UI Considerations

HyperDX emphasizes an intuitive UX designed for engineers who want speed and clarity. The full-text search experience blends naturally with property-based filters, supporting rapid narrowing of results. The UI is designed to empower users to:

Perform fast searches across logs, traces, and metrics
Visualize relationships with event deltas and trend analyses
Create dashboards that highlight high-cardinality events without heavy query logic
Tailor alerting rules to the team’s operational needs
Access live data streams so you never miss the latest events

Connectivity and Ecosystem

HyperDX’s compatibility with OpenTelemetry ensures you can leverage a broad ecosystem of instrumentation libraries and exporters. Whether you’re instrumenting a microservices architecture or a more monolithic stack, HyperDX can ingest telemetry data from a diverse set of sources and present it in a coherent, actionable format.

Open Collaboration and Documentation

Documentation hub: A dedicated set of docs guides you through installation, configuration, and usage
Community channels: Discord and GitHub discussions provide a space to ask questions, propose enhancements, and share use cases
Bug reports and feature requests: Easy-to-use channels to report issues or suggest features, fueling a collaborative development process

Getting Started: A Quick Guide

1) Choose your deployment path: local all-in-one container for testing, or a production-ready deployment aligned with your ClickHouse environment 2) Install or deploy OpenTelemetry instrumentation in your applications 3) Point your collectors to the OpenTelemetry endpoint in HyperDX 4) Ingest logs, metrics, traces, and session replays 5) Use the HyperDX UI to search, correlate, and visualize telemetry 6) Set up alerts and dashboards to monitor health and performance

If you’re new to ClickHouse, remember that HyperDX is designed to work atop your existing ClickHouse schema, making it a natural extension for teams already invested in ClickHouse for data analytics and operational telemetry. The combination of ClickHouse’s performance and HyperDX’s observability capabilities creates a powerful platform for diagnosing and solving production issues with speed and confidence.

Images and Visual Aids from the Input

HyperDX logo: a recognizable emblem at the top of the page, reinforcing branding and identity
Search splash image: a visual representation of the unified search experience across logs and traces, underscoring the core value proposition of HyperDX

Conclusion: Embracing a Unified Telemetry Paradigm

HyperDX represents a thoughtful convergence of logs, traces, metrics, and session data into a single, accessible observability solution built on top of ClickHouse. Its schema-agnostic approach, OpenTelemetry compatibility, and streamlined deployment options position it as a compelling choice for teams seeking speed, clarity, and reliability. By reducing the friction of data access, accelerating root-cause analysis, and enabling straightforward alerting and dashboards, HyperDX helps engineers ship reliable software and maintain healthy production systems.

Whether you are exploring local experimentation with the all-in-one container or planning a scalable production deployment via ClickStack or ClickHouse Cloud, HyperDX provides a cohesive, data-driven foundation for observability. Its philosophy centers on making production telemetry accessible to every engineer, eliminating the need for expensive and opaque tooling, and fostering a culture of rapid learning from real-time data.

If you want to dive deeper, start by visiting HyperDX’s official site, join the Discord community for real-time conversations, and explore the deployment and instrumentation guides. The project invites collaboration, discussion, and hands-on contributions—from feature ideas to bug fixes to documentation improvements. By engaging with the project, you participate in shaping the future of observability in ClickHouse-enabled environments.

Notes for readers

For users behind a firewall, ensure ports 8080, 8000, and 4318 are accessible to enable the UI, API, and OpenTelemetry collector.
If you plan to contribute, consult the Contributor Guide and the issue tracker to propose enhancements or report bugs.
Opting out of usage data collection is straightforward via an environment variable, preserving privacy while enabling opt-in telemetry for broader product improvements.

In sum, HyperDX is not just a product; it’s a philosophy about observability for modern software. By unifying telemetry and providing a fast, flexible interface on top of ClickHouse, HyperDX empowers engineers to move from signal to solution with unprecedented speed and confidence.