The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2023–2025
HyperDX bet open source could beat Datadog, then ClickHouse acquired it for ClickStack
Open-source observability startup HyperDX built a Kibana-style UI on any ClickHouse cluster, then was acquired by ClickHouse in 2025 to anchor ClickStack.
HyperDX
What the business is
HyperDX builds open-source (MIT) observability software that unifies logs, traces, metrics and session replays on top of ClickHouse; v2 is a schema-agnostic UI that searches and visualizes logs and traces on any ClickHouse cluster — 'imagine Kibana, for ClickHouse' — without Elastic's proprietary stack.
How it started
Mike (previously leading developer experience at LogDNA/Mezmo) and Warren (SRE #1 at an earlier startup) founded HyperDX after watching engineers stitch Bugsnag, LogRocket and CloudWatch together by hand while Datadog or New Relic quotes exceeded their AWS bills. Their first product, launched to HN on 2023-09-18 as an 'open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative', centralized logs, traces, metrics and session replays on OpenTelemetry with ClickHouse (S3-backed) storage.
What happened
That Show HN drew 722 points and 163 comments, but the next year revealed the real opening: teams were moving observability data warehouses to ClickHouse (the founders cited Uber and Cloudflare), yet the UI layer was either clunky BI tooling or too tied to one ingestion architecture — 'we used to be in this category,' they admitted. So v2, posted 2024-11-12 (125 points, 40 comments), made the product a schema-agnostic, browser-runnable UI for any ClickHouse cluster: Lucene-style search plus SQL, column-pruned queries (~40% faster), materialized-column rewrites (10x faster) and event-delta outlier analysis. In that thread the founders argued their moat was end-user experience, 'more like Gitlab', not hosting infrastructure, so staying MIT open source was safe.
How it ended up
On 2025-03-13 HN carried 'ClickHouse acquires HyperDX', and on 2025-06-05 the founders launched ClickStack (Show HN, 241 points) as 'Mike & Warren from HyperDX (now part of ClickHouse)': ClickHouse for storage, HyperDX (MIT) for visualization and OpenTelemetry for ingestion. The acquired product now anchors ClickHouse's open-source observability stack.
Background
HyperDX is an open-source observability company founded by Mike and Warren, two engineers who had led developer experience at LogDNA/Mezmo and served as SRE #1 at an earlier startup. Their first product, launched on HN in September 2023 as an 'open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative', unified logs, traces, metrics and session replays on top of OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse (S3-backed) storage — a direct answer to tool fragmentation and to Datadog or New Relic bills that exceeded teams' AWS bills.
The company's second act was a bet about the layer that would win. As teams moved observability data warehouses to ClickHouse (founders cited Uber and Cloudflare), the UI layer was either clunky BI tooling or locked to one ingestion architecture. So HyperDX v2 became a schema-agnostic, browser-runnable UI for any ClickHouse cluster — Lucene-style and SQL search, column-pruned queries, materialized-column rewrites and event-delta analysis — announced in a 2024-11-12 Show HN (125 points, 40 comments) that positioned it as an open-source Kibana alternative for ClickHouse.
The bet paid off structurally: ClickHouse acquired HyperDX in March 2025, and by June 2025 the founders were shipping ClickStack — ClickHouse storage, HyperDX visualization, OpenTelemetry ingestion — as the open-source answer to Datadog. As of the 2026-09-05 snapshot the hyperdxio/hyperdx repo showed 9.9k stars and 462 forks, and its README described HyperDX as a core component of ClickStack.
What has to be true
- The founders had lived the pain themselves: hand-correlating Bugsnag, LogRocket and CloudWatch while Datadog pricing exceeded their AWS bills.
- ClickHouse was winning observability storage at Uber, Cloudflare and elsewhere, but its UI layer was BI tools or ingestion-locked products — leaving room for a neutral, developer-friendly front end.
- A browser-runnable, schema-agnostic UI on ClickHouse's HTTP interface removed installation and lock-in barriers: teams could point it at a cluster they already ran.
- Staying MIT open source made HyperDX safe for ClickHouse to bet on, which is what turned a rival UI layer into the face of ClickStack.
What can be applied
Own the experience layer on a substrate users already run: HyperDX became ClickHouse's observability UI by staying open, schema-agnostic and cheaper than the proprietary suites it attacked.
Aftermath
As of the 2026-09-05 GitHub snapshot, hyperdxio/hyperdx shows 9.9k stars and 462 forks; the README now describes HyperDX as 'a core component of ClickStack', ClickHouse's open-source observability stack that combines ClickHouse storage, HyperDX visualization and OpenTelemetry ingestion, with deployment docs, a ClickHouse Cloud sign-up and an in-browser live demo. No revenue or funding figures appear in the reviewed sources; the founders' own posts describe the March 2025 acquisition by ClickHouse.
Sources
- Show HN: HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative
- Show HN: Open-source Kibana alternative for logs and traces in ClickHouse
- ClickHouse acquires HyperDX: The future of open-source observability
- Show HN: ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX
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