Earlier this month we announced that Pulse is now NeverBlink and that we're expanding beyond Elasticsearch and OpenSearch to transform how mission-critical databases are maintained. Today we're delivering on the first of those promises: NeverBlink now supports ClickHouse.
NeverBlink for ClickHouse brings continuous health checks, alerting, automated root-cause analysis, query analytics, prioritized remediation guidance, and 24/7 expert support to ClickHouse clusters - whether you run ClickHouse Cloud or self-host. It's the same AI database administrator already trusted in production by brands like Akamai, Perforce, and Palo Alto Networks, now fluent in a new engine.
Adding your first cluster is free. Get started here.
Why ClickHouse, and Why Now
ClickHouse has become the default engine for real-time analytics. It's trusted by leading AI and tech companies such as Anthropic, Meta, Tesla, Sony, Lyft, Capital One, and Instacart to power their most demanding workloads, and its adoption has accelerated massively - 4,000+ customers and a $15B valuation. More and more of the teams we work with run ClickHouse next to their search and transactional databases, often powering the dashboards and features their customers see directly.
That success comes with an operational bill. ClickHouse is honest about its own state - it exposes over a thousand metrics through system tables - but very few teams have the expertise to know which fifteen actually predict outages, or what to do when one of them turns red. A growing merge backlog is not a CPU problem. Replication lag is not always a network problem. MEMORY_LIMIT_EXCEEDED errors killing queries at peak hours are usually a workload problem, not a hardware one. We wrote about this at length in ClickHouse Monitoring: Metrics That Matter and Diagnosing High CPU and Memory in ClickHouse.
Meanwhile, AI-driven development is significantly increasing the complexity and demands on database infrastructure. Engineering teams are struggling to keep up with maintaining and optimizing their databases in a world that's moving at AI speed. Databases are mission-critical, and enterprises can't trust raw LLMs with their database infrastructure - there's no wiggle room for error or hallucinations. NeverBlink is built by a team of database experts to guarantee database optimization and resilience in the AI era: AI does the continuous watching and investigation, grounded in engine-specific knowledge, and engineers stay in control of what gets applied.
What NeverBlink for ClickHouse Does
Continuous health checks and automated root-cause analysis. NeverBlink continuously evaluates your clusters and surfaces issues like replication lag, merge and part failures, part-count explosions, Keeper degradation, and performance regressions - before they become incidents. Instead of an unexplained red graph, you get a diagnosis: what changed, why it matters, and what to do about it.
Query Analytics and table reviews. NeverBlink automatically pinpoints the slow, expensive queries driving up your cluster's latency and cost, and reviews your table designs for schema inefficiencies - wrong data types, missing or misused ordering keys, missing TTLs, oversharded tables. Every finding comes with concrete, prioritized fixes.
Performance and cost-saving recommendations. ClickHouse costs are driven by a handful of levers: bytes scanned per query, storage volume, and over-provisioned compute "just in case". NeverBlink identifies expensive queries, schema inefficiencies, and opportunities to right-size resources. Every recommendation comes with clear reasoning and the actions to take - engineers decide what gets applied, with no black-box automation touching production.
Nothing installed on your database servers. NeverBlink works with ClickHouse Cloud and self-hosted deployments alike, with no agents on your nodes and no changes to your infrastructure.
Unlimited expert consulting. Premium customers get unlimited access to the BigData Boutique team - the same senior engineers who have been rescuing and optimizing production data platforms for over 15 years. When a situation calls for human judgment, it's there, 24/7.
On ClickHouse Cloud? You're Covered Too
NeverBlink fully supports ClickHouse Cloud, and if you're running there you may be wondering why you'd need it at all. Here's the thing: a managed service solves the infrastructure piece - provisioning, upgrades, backups, uptime. But infrastructure is just one piece of the puzzle.
No managed service can save you from unoptimized application and developer usage. A query that scans a billion rows because the table's ordering key doesn't match the access pattern will be just as slow - and just as expensive - on ClickHouse Cloud as anywhere else. Insert patterns that create thousands of tiny parts, missing TTLs quietly growing your storage bill, dashboards hammering the cluster with unaggregated queries: these are workload problems, and they're yours regardless of who runs the servers. Managed pricing often makes them more expensive, since the easy fix is always scaling up.
That's exactly the layer NeverBlink covers: query analytics, table structure reviews, ingestion optimizations, and cost recommendations that work on top of your managed service rather than instead of it. ClickHouse Cloud keeps the cluster running; NeverBlink makes sure what you run on it is worth the bill.
Get More from Your ClickHouse Clusters
Tooling is a means; outcomes are the point. Here's what this translates to:
- Prevent downtime. The best incident is the one addressed while it's still a warning. Continuous, proactive analysis means fewer 3am pages and fewer customer-visible outages on the dashboards your product depends on.
- Cut cluster costs. Customers report 25-30% lower database costs from query optimization, schema fixes, and right-sizing - instead of the default answer of throwing more hardware at the problem.
- Give engineers their time back. Customers report 80-90% less time spent on database management. That's time that goes back into building product rather than correlating metrics, logs, and query behavior by hand.
- Stop depending on scarce specialists. ClickHouse experts are hard to hire and harder to retain. NeverBlink packages that expertise into a platform, with real humans behind it when you need them.
Our customers at LinearB have been running NeverBlink for ClickHouse in production:
"ClickHouse serves the real-time analytics behind our customer-facing dashboards, so we need predictable low-latency performance around the clock. NeverBlink provides continuous insights on queries and node sizing, and walks us through the changes required to optimize the cluster. Our dashboard queries dropped from 8 seconds to subsecond, and the memory footprint and latency of our ClickHouse pipelines have reduced significantly. We can now focus on building a great product for our customers and not worry about our databases daily."
- Ariel Illouz, VP of Engineering at LinearB
Get Started
NeverBlink for ClickHouse is available today. If you're running ClickHouse in production - Cloud or self-hosted - we'd love to show you what NeverBlink finds in your clusters. Onboarding takes minutes, and the first health report usually pays for itself.
