Most observability vendors charge you for the privilege of storing and querying your own telemetry. It’s fine at first. Then the bill grows faster than the system it’s watching, and you end up paying more to see less.
We ran into this ourselves. At 545M events a minute and 61.2M concurrent users monitored, a pure SaaS backend stopped making sense for us, financially or operationally. So we built Last9 Glassbox: our stack, running inside the customer’s own cloud account instead of ours.
That covered the observability layer. ClickHouse® was the harder problem.
We use ClickHouse because it holds cost and query performance together without forcing the sampling or retention trade-offs most vendors push on you. But running it well, at our volume, takes a dedicated team. Handing that to a generic managed-database provider would’ve undone the point of bring-your-own-cloud in the first place. You’d be back to trusting someone else with your data.
So we partnered with Altinity.
Altinity runs ClickHouse inside the customer’s own cloud account, with Altinity’s SREs and DBAs handling the database side. Combined with Last9 Glassbox, customers get metrics, logs, traces, and profiles running on an open-source stack, in their own environment, without hiring for ClickHouse operations.
Our CEO, Nishant Modak, put it this way:
As a CEO, my favorite thing about Altinity is that I never have to hear about problems with ClickHouse.
If you’re running observability at scale and watching the bill climb faster than usage, this is built for you.
Here’s what that setup gets you:
- Full data ownership, zero database maintenance. Your telemetry stays in your own cloud account; Altinity’s SREs and DBAs run the ClickHouse cluster.
- No lock-in. The stack is open source end to end, storage layer included, so nothing traps your data in a proprietary format or forces a rewrite to leave.
- Capacity-based pricing. You pay for the cluster you provision, not for every event you send. When traffic doubles during a sale or a 3 a.m. incident, an ingestion-priced bill doubles with it, this one holds flat.
- No renewal-driven migrations. You’re not rushing a data move or re-architecting your pipeline every time a contract comes up for renewal.
Book a consultation, or find Last9 Glassbox and Altinity on the AWS Marketplace.
