---
title: "Stop guessing in production: Full fidelity tracing at scale with ClickHouse and Odigos"
description: "Distributed tracing frequently suffers from visibility gaps, broken context across asynchronous boundaries like Kafka, and high operational overhead from manually configuring OpenTelemetry SDKs and collectors. To resolve these issues, Odigos provides zero-code instrumentation via eBPF probes that dynamically attach to running workloads without modifying application code. An intelligent control plane within Odigos dynamically adjusts trace sampling and attribute enrichment based on real-time latency and error rates. The resulting telemetry exports over OTLP into ClickStack, an all-in-one backend featuring an OpenTelemetry Collector, ClickHouse storage, and the HyperDX query interface. This unified pipeline preserves end-to-end trace continuity, captures deep application and database context, and enables fast SQL-based trace analysis."
---

# Stop guessing in production: Full fidelity tracing at scale with ClickHouse and Odigos

[Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse) · Will Searle · May 5, 2026

**Type:** Problem & solution

## Summary

Distributed tracing frequently suffers from visibility gaps, broken context across asynchronous boundaries like Kafka, and high operational overhead from manually configuring OpenTelemetry SDKs and collectors. To resolve these issues, Odigos provides zero-code instrumentation via eBPF probes that dynamically attach to running workloads without modifying application code. An intelligent control plane within Odigos dynamically adjusts trace sampling and attribute enrichment based on real-time latency and error rates. The resulting telemetry exports over OTLP into ClickStack, an all-in-one backend featuring an OpenTelemetry Collector, ClickHouse storage, and the HyperDX query interface. This unified pipeline preserves end-to-end trace continuity, captures deep application and database context, and enables fast SQL-based trace analysis.

## Context

Distributed systems often suffer from observability gaps, such as broken traces across asynchronous messaging boundaries like Kafka, missing spans due to the effort of maintaining OpenTelemetry SDKs, and telemetry lacking request-level metadata or database visibility. Operating OpenTelemetry pipelines also introduces operational overhead through collector configurations and scalability risks.

## Approach / What changed

The solution pairs Odigos with ClickStack. Odigos uses eBPF probes to instrument applications, runtimes, and messaging systems at the library level without code modifications, while its telemetry control plane dynamically adjusts trace sampling and payload detail based on real-time latency and error signals. Telemetry is exported over OTLP into ClickStack, an all-in-one backend combining an OpenTelemetry Collector, a ClickHouse storage instance, and the HyperDX UI for SQL-driven querying and visualization.

## Takeaways

- Odigos uses eBPF probes to intercept network calls, system calls, and runtime libraries without requiring code modifications, binary changes, or language agents.
- In asynchronous messaging systems like Kafka, Odigos preserves trace context across producers and consumers and can capture message payloads directly in span attributes.
- ClickStack combines an OpenTelemetry Collector, ClickHouse storage, and HyperDX UI to ingest and query high-throughput trace data via SQL without requiring manual schema creation.

**Tags:** [Kafka](https://yomu.fyi/topic/kafka), [Kubernetes](https://yomu.fyi/topic/kubernetes), [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring), [Observability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/observability)

- Source: [Clickhouse](https://clickhouse.com/blog/odigos-full-fidelity-tracing)
- Source URL: https://clickhouse.com/blog/odigos-full-fidelity-tracing
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-28T01:25:24.955Z

[Read original post](https://clickhouse.com/blog/odigos-full-fidelity-tracing)