Our vision for the ClickHouse Grafana plugin

Summary

ClickHouse is widely used with Grafana for observability and real-time analytics, but requiring users to write raw SQL creates onboarding and exploration friction. To simplify the user experience, planned updates to the ClickHouse Grafana plugin introduce native interfaces such as click-to-filter actions, categorized OpenTelemetry attribute displays, and guided variable editors. A new compact search mode leverages the hasToken function for fast log filtering, while a visual metrics builder simplifies aggregating OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes metrics without manual queries. Prebuilt dashboards for logs and traces will accelerate initial setup alongside automated annotations derived from service version changes and Kubernetes lifecycle events. Future prototypes also explore bidirectional SQL AST parsing for seamless query editing, JWT user identity forwarding for fine-grained access control, and conversational query generation.

Takeaways

1. 1

   The planned compact search mode uses ClickHouse's hasToken() function to execute full-text searches on indexed columns across billions of log lines without requiring manual SQL.

2. 2

   Annotations can be automatically generated by detecting changes in OpenTelemetry resource attributes like service.version or container.image.tag, eliminating external webhooks or API calls.

3. 3

   JWT forwarding is being explored to pass individual Grafana user identities to ClickHouse queries, enabling audit trails, user-level query cost tracking, and row-level access control.