ClickHouse as a core storage backend

[yurishkuro]

Summary

Build first-class support for ClickHouse  as an official Jaeger backend. ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database for OLAP use cases. It is highly efficient and performant for high volumes of ingestion and search making it a good database for tracing and logging data specifically. It can also do aggregates very quickly which will come in handy for several features in Jaeger.

Benefits to the users:

• Efficient backend
• Powerful search
• Analytics capability, e.g. the possibility to support the APM function (Monitoring tab in Jaeger) directly from ClickHouse

Background

• This ticket is a part of CNCG GSoC program (see Jaeger project entry).
• Applications will be open from March-20 to April-4: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

This is a continuation of #1438. Currently, there is one (or more) community-supported plugins for ClickHouse as a Jaeger storage backend. This ticket is about making it one of the core backends supported by Jaeger, on the level of Cassandra/Elasticsearch.

Scope

• Design table schema, document trade-offs
• Implement plugin/storage/clickhouse module and integrate it with storage.Factory
  • ClickHouse is not optimized for individual inserts, need to address that (cf. OTel Collector ClickHouse exporter)
  • For deployments with Kafka, investigate Kafka Connector for ClickHouse for direct ingestion
• Address schema creation problem (similar to plugin/storage/cassandra/schema)
• Address management needs if any (e.g., ES has index rollover, not sure if ClickHouse needs something similar)
• Add relevant documentation to the Jaeger website

Expected outcomes

• Design table schema, document trade-offs
• Implement ClickHouse support as core storage backend
• Address schema creation problem / tooling
• Add relevant documentation to the Jaeger website

Stretch goals

• Use Kafka Connector for ClickHouse for bulk inserts
• Support Monitoring tab (https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/1.43/spm/) in Jaeger directly from ClickHouse

[yurishkuro]

For reference:

• Jaeger's own implementation via plugin: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-clickhouse/
• OTEL's implementation https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/exporter/clickhouseexporter

[abhi1287]

Suggestion: It would be nice to somehow retain the type information of custom tags.
The otel implementation you linked above simply stores a vector of string key value pairs.
While jaeger does the same with elastic search, it is a pain in running aggregate queries over the custom tags in spans.

[yurishkuro]

@abhi1287 can you book a separate issue for this (it sounds like a cross-storage problem) and give examples of custom tags that need numeric aggregations?

[siddharthsingh025]

Is anyone working on this ??@yurishkuro

[yurishkuro]

@siddharthsingh025 this ticket is in support of GSOC program that starts in the summer.

[siddharthsingh025]

@yurishkuro , I would like to contribute / participate for gsoc 2023 by working with Jaegar. I researched a lot on this project and I would really like to contribute to this project. I am familiar with Golang and SQL database design. I also have a good knowledge about opentelemetry. Looking forward for your guidance on this project. Thanks!

[yurishkuro]

@siddharthsingh025 please see GSOC's guidelines on applying, and you can specify the Jaeger project as a preference.

[octonawish-akcodes]

I am interested in this project any resources and slack link ?

[yanyanran]

@yurishkuro Hello! I am very interested in this project and would like to contribute to Jaeger, I am familiar with Golang and love to learn and delve into distributed systems, I think it is really interesting. I also learned a lot about the SQL database, and I can devote myself to the project. Can you give me some advice and guidance? Thank u!

[Reireirei0]

@yurishkuro , I'd like to contribute to Jaeger. It just so happens that I am currently maintaining a clickhouse query service in ByteDance as an intern. This service is called rigel and is also written in golang. With your guidance, I am pretty confident in finishing this feature. Looking forward to your guidance! Thanks!

[Nandini99-git]

Hey @yurishkuro , I am interested in this project for GSOC 2023. I want to work on this project. I am fresher but I am familiar with the tools and technology which is required for this project.

[yurishkuro]

Applications will be open from March-20 to April-4: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/