---
title: "What's new in ClickStack - Aug ’26"
description: "The August ClickStack update covers five releases, v2.34 through v2.38, with dashboards as the main focus. Dashboard variables are generally available, letting filters supply selected values to raw SQL, builder fields, Lucene, and PromQL queries, while chained filters can narrow one another. Charts add formulas for combining series, a metrics explorer previews emitted metrics, and release markers align service versions with events such as latency spikes. The update also introduces the TimeSeries engine and PromQL support in private preview for Managed ClickStack and experimentally in open source, alongside a beta LLM observability dashboard, alerting improvements, OIDC collector authentication, and MCP server changes, including up to ten notification targets, alert names and tags, evaluation history through the API, and richer webhook payloads."
---

# What's new in ClickStack - Aug ’26

[Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse) · Sep 16, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

The August ClickStack update covers five releases, v2.34 through v2.38, with dashboards as the main focus. Dashboard variables are generally available, letting filters supply selected values to raw SQL, builder fields, Lucene, and PromQL queries, while chained filters can narrow one another. Charts add formulas for combining series, a metrics explorer previews emitted metrics, and release markers align service versions with events such as latency spikes. The update also introduces the TimeSeries engine and PromQL support in private preview for Managed ClickStack and experimentally in open source, alongside a beta LLM observability dashboard, alerting improvements, OIDC collector authentication, and MCP server changes, including up to ten notification targets, alert names and tags, evaluation history through the API, and richer webhook payloads.

## Context

A monthly ClickStack product update covering releases v2.34 through v2.38 and changes to dashboards, Prometheus support, alerting, authentication, LLM observability, and the MCP server.

## Approach / What changed

The update adds dashboard variables that can be substituted into SQL, Lucene, and PromQL, including macros for empty selections and mappings across data sources. It also adds chart formulas, a metrics explorer, release markers, a TimeSeries engine with PromQL support, alerting improvements, OIDC authentication for the collector, and other dashboard and investigation features.

## Takeaways

- Dashboard variables can be referenced across SQL expressions, Lucene queries, and PromQL; chained filters can use other variables to narrow their available values.
- The TimeSeries engine and PromQL support let existing Prometheus collectors and remote-write configurations feed ClickStack, but visual PromQL query building and alerting on PromQL queries are not yet supported.
- Alerting now supports up to ten notification targets per alert, alert names and tags, evaluation history through the API, and richer webhook payloads.

## FAQ

### How do dashboard variables differ from ordinary ClickStack filters?

Ordinary filters add a WHERE condition to applicable tiles, while variables expose the current selection as $variableName for use wherever a tile query needs it. Variables can also drive cross-source mappings and chained filters.

### Can ClickStack replace Prometheus for existing PromQL workloads?

The TimeSeries engine and PromQL support allow existing collectors and scrape configurations to send metrics through Prometheus remote write and query them in ClickStack, Grafana, or ClickHouse. The feature is in private preview for Managed ClickStack and experimental in open source, with some PromQL capabilities still expanding.

### What happens when a dashboard variable has no selection?

A bare variable renders as NULL, which can silently empty a chart. The $\_\_filter and $\_\_conditionalAll macros handle empty selections by producing an always-true condition or omitting a condition, respectively.

**Tags:** [MCP](https://yomu.fyi/topic/mcp), [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring), [Prometheus](https://yomu.fyi/topic/prometheus)

- Source: [Clickhouse](https://clickhouse.com/blog/whats-new-in-clickstack-august-2026)
- Source URL: https://clickhouse.com/blog/whats-new-in-clickstack-august-2026
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-17T18:00:09.503Z

[Read original post](https://clickhouse.com/blog/whats-new-in-clickstack-august-2026)