Grafana vs Clustersight for ClickHouse Monitoring

Short answer: Grafana requires 4–6 custom dashboards, a Prometheus exporter, and manual alerting rules to get basic ClickHouse visibility — and still only covers ~30% of the metrics that matter. Clustersight deploys in 8 minutes with 10 panels, 10 alert rules, and SQL fix commands included.

The Core Difference

Grafana is a visualization layer. It can display any data you feed it, but it knows nothing about ClickHouse internals. It cannot automatically surface broken parts, mutation queue backlogs, or replication lag from ClickHouse's system tables — you must build and maintain all of that yourself.

Clustersight was designed exclusively for ClickHouse. It queries 300+ metrics from ClickHouse system tables out of the box, with no configuration required.

Feature Comparison

| Feature | Grafana | Clustersight | |---|---|---| | Setup time | 4–8 hours | Under 8 minutes | | ClickHouse-specific panels | Build yourself | 10 included | | Broken parts detection | Manual query | Automatic | | Replication lag monitoring | Manual | Automatic | | Alert fix commands | None | Included | | Health score | No | 0–100 score | | Merge queue monitoring | Manual | Automatic | | Mutation queue monitoring | Manual | Automatic | | ZooKeeper health | Manual | Automatic | | Cost | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier available |

When Grafana Makes Sense

Grafana is the right choice if:

You already have a mature Grafana+Prometheus stack and want to add ClickHouse to existing dashboards
You have engineering bandwidth to build and maintain custom ClickHouse dashboards
You need to combine ClickHouse metrics with other infrastructure in a single view

When Clustersight Makes Sense

Clustersight is the right choice if:

You want ClickHouse-specific monitoring in minutes, not hours
You need alerts that tell you what to run, not just what's wrong
You want coverage of operational metrics that Grafana's ClickHouse integration doesn't expose

Migration Path

Many teams start with Clustersight and keep Grafana for cross-system infrastructure views. The two are complementary.

External reference: Grafana ClickHouse plugin documentation