---
title: "Introducing ClickHouse's new TimeSeries Engine: Your drop-In Prometheus replacement"
description: "ClickHouse announces the private preview of PromQL and its TimeSeries table engine in ClickHouse Cloud, allowing Prometheus metrics to be sent through remote write and queried in ClickStack, Grafana, or ClickHouse. Prometheus metrics are shaped by pull-based collection: applications expose current state, collectors add scrape-time timestamps, and types such as counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries determine interpretation. PromQL preserves the resulting semantics, including counter reset handling, range-window extrapolation, and histogram bucket processing, rather than requiring teams to reproduce those rules in SQL or a translation layer. The announcement describes limited preview access, says supported functions and operators are documented separately, and identifies future work around downsampling, native histograms, rules, additional protocols, and direct OpenTelemetry export."
---

# Introducing ClickHouse's new TimeSeries Engine: Your drop-In Prometheus replacement

[Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse) · Sep 15, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

ClickHouse announces the private preview of PromQL and its TimeSeries table engine in ClickHouse Cloud, allowing Prometheus metrics to be sent through remote write and queried in ClickStack, Grafana, or ClickHouse. Prometheus metrics are shaped by pull-based collection: applications expose current state, collectors add scrape-time timestamps, and types such as counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries determine interpretation. PromQL preserves the resulting semantics, including counter reset handling, range-window extrapolation, and histogram bucket processing, rather than requiring teams to reproduce those rules in SQL or a translation layer. The announcement describes limited preview access, says supported functions and operators are documented separately, and identifies future work around downsampling, native histograms, rules, additional protocols, and direct OpenTelemetry export.

## Context

Prometheus metrics are not ordinary timestamped numeric columns. Applications expose current state, collectors establish timestamps during scrapes, and metric types encode interpretation such as counter resets or histogram buckets; PromQL applies those semantics during queries.

## Approach / What changed

The preview accepts metrics through Prometheus remote write into a ClickHouse TimeSeries table, then evaluates PromQL through ClickStack, Grafana, or ClickHouse. This moves PromQL interpretation into ClickHouse rather than requiring users to rewrite queries in SQL or maintain a PromQL-to-SQL translation layer.

## Takeaways

- Prometheus remote write sends metrics into a ClickHouse TimeSeries table, where they can be queried with PromQL through ClickStack, Grafana, or ClickHouse.
- PromQL query behavior depends on the Prometheus lifecycle, including scrape-time timestamps, counter resets, irregular sample spacing, and histogram bucket families.
- The private preview does not present every planned capability; future work includes downsampling, Native Histograms, RecordingRules, AlertingRules, additional protocols, and direct OTEL ClickHouse Exporter insertion.

## FAQ

### Why does ClickHouse support PromQL instead of only offering SQL queries?

PromQL carries semantics tied to Prometheus collection and metric types, including reset handling, extrapolation, and histogram processing. Reproducing those details in SQL or a translation layer can produce plausible but different results, so the preview evaluates PromQL in the server.

### How do Prometheus metrics enter and leave ClickHouse?

Metrics enter through Prometheus remote write and are stored in a ClickHouse TimeSeries table. They can be queried with PromQL through ClickStack, Grafana, or ClickHouse.

### Which Prometheus features are still planned for later work?

The post lists downsampling, Native Histograms, migration of RecordingRules and AlertingRules, OpenMetrics and remote-write v2 support, and direct insertion through the official OTEL ClickHouse Exporter as areas for future work.

**Tags:** [ClickHouse](https://yomu.fyi/topic/clickhouse), [Prometheus](https://yomu.fyi/topic/prometheus), [PromQL](https://yomu.fyi/topic/promql)

- Source: [Clickhouse](https://clickhouse.com/blog/introducing-promql)
- Source URL: https://clickhouse.com/blog/introducing-promql
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-15T16:02:19.347Z

[Read original post](https://clickhouse.com/blog/introducing-promql)