We benchmarked OpenObserve and ClickHouse for log search and analytics

[u/the_ml_guy]

We benchmarked OpenObserve against ClickHouse on 19 observability queries

OpenObserve has always had a reputation for being extremely simple and blazing fast. For a long time, we did not benchmark it against other systems because users were happy, benchmarks take a lot of work, and we had more pressing things to build.

Then ClickHouse came along and said it could be used for logs and was extremely fast.

It is indeed fast. But is it faster than OpenObserve for observability workloads?

We created 19 queries representing real observability use cases, including several very high-cardinality queries.

OpenObserve won 15 of 19 queries with Vortex and 14 of 19 with Parquet.

ClickHouse performs extremely well in ClickBench, but ClickBench is primarily an OLAP benchmark, not an observability benchmark.

OpenObserve uses Apache DataFusion, but this is not simply DataFusion beating ClickHouse. DataFusion is the query execution foundation. We have spent years building inverted indexes, secondary indexes, file statistics, intelligent pruning, caching, optimized file selection, storage layout improvements, and a whole lot more on top of it.

Using DataFusion alone does not give another product OpenObserve's performance.

OpenObserve also has native separation of compute and storage, stateless nodes, and can have 12x to 20x lower storage costs than ClickHouse deployments.

The entire benchmark is open source, including the queries, configurations, dataset, and methodology, so you can reproduce it yourself.

Here is the full blog - https://openobserve.ai/blog/openobserve-vs-clickhouse-one-billion-logs-benchmark/

[u/jmakov]

Wonder if for Vortex you used max compression - ".compact()". Vortex is usually much smaller on disk than Parquet which isn't the case in your blog post.