Deploy and Host ClickStack on Railway

ClickStack is ClickHouse's open-source observability stack: the HyperDX UI for logs, traces, metrics and session replays, an OpenTelemetry collector, and ClickHouse for storage. It is an alternative to Datadog, New Relic and Elastic, with fast full-text and SQL search over all your telemetry, and it is native to OpenTelemetry: any app instrumented with an OpenTelemetry SDK can send data to it.

About Hosting ClickStack

ClickStack has four parts: HyperDX (UI, API and alerts), an OpenTelemetry collector that receives data and gets its pipeline from HyperDX over OpAMP, ClickHouse, which stores the data, and MongoDB for users, dashboards and alerts. A fresh HyperDX lets the first visitor create the admin account, and the databases need passwords and must stay off the public internet.

This template creates your admin account at deploy so sign-up is closed, turns on API-key authentication for the collector's OTLP endpoint, and keeps ClickHouse and MongoDB private and password-protected. Versions are pinned, the services listen on Railway's IPv6 private network, and ClickHouse keeps its own system logs small.

Common Use Cases

Centralized logs with fast search, filters and log-to-trace links
Distributed tracing and APM for services on Railway or anywhere else
Application metrics with dashboards and alerts
Frontend session replay correlated with backend traces
A self-hosted Datadog, New Relic or Elastic alternative on ClickHouse

Dependencies for ClickStack Hosting

ClickHouse 26.8 and MongoDB 7.0 (included, private)
An app instrumented with OpenTelemetry to send data

Deployment Dependencies

HyperDX: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx
ClickStack documentation: https://clickhouse.com/docs/use-cases/observability/clickstack
OpenTelemetry instrumentation: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/

Implementation Details

What you set: HYPERDX_ADMIN_EMAIL, the email you log in with (default admin@example.com; change it to your own).

After deploy:

Open the HyperDX URL and log in with HYPERDX_ADMIN_EMAIL and the generated HYPERDX_ADMIN_PASSWORD (HyperDX service → Variables).
In HyperDX, open Team Settings and copy the ingestion API key.
In your app, set OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT to the Collector's OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT variable, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=authorization= and OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf. Apps in the same Railway project can use the private endpoints in the Collector variables.

This template:

Creates the admin at deploy; HyperDX allows one team, so nobody else can sign up
Requires your team's API key on the OTLP endpoint (HTTP and gRPC); requests without it get 401
Keeps ClickHouse and MongoDB private and password-protected
Sets up the ClickHouse connection and the Logs, Traces, Metrics and Sessions sources on the first start
Keeps ClickHouse system logs to 3 days and turns off the noisy ones
Pins HyperDX 2.43.1, ClickHouse 26.8.36.3 and MongoDB 7.0.45, with healthchecks

Notes: the stack idles at about 1.5 GB of RAM; ClickHouse memory and the volume grow with the data you send. Telemetry is kept for 30 days by default.

Why Deploy ClickStack on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying ClickStack on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.