A practical guide based on shipping this for a crypto-derivatives platform — annual observability bill went from high six figures to ~$50K, with faster queries and AI-powered log search as a bonus. Why I'm writing this If you're paying mid-six figures for Elasticsearch and ~90% of your queries are aggregations (error counts, latency percentiles, service health), you're paying full price for a feature you barely use — full-text search. This post walks through how a crypto exchange replaced Elasticsearch with ClickHouse for OpenTelemetry logs, traces, and metrics. Same OTEL instrumentation, just a different backend. Result: 5× smaller storage footprint, 2-6× faster queries on benchmarks, and natural-language log queries via an AI agent — at ~10% of the cost. If you have an existing Elasticsearch + Kibana observability stack and you've been wondering whether ClickHouse is a serious alternative, this is the deep-dive.…