This article details Knock's approach to managing high-cardinality BEAM metrics by migrating from Datadog to ClickHouse to reduce costs. The author explains how metrics with tags like pod_name and kube_node create exponential custom metric costs in Datadog. The solution leverages ClickHouse's ability to handle detailed telemetry data more cost-effectively while maintaining observability granularity.
Background
BEAM is the virtual machine that runs Erlang and Elixir applications, generating detailed runtime metrics that often include high-cardinality tags from containerized environments. ClickHouse is an open-source columnar database known for its high-performance analytics capabilities.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Mar 18, 2026 at 11:44 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10