Case Study: Blacksmith achieves fast CI and real-time observability with ClickHouse Cloud

How Blacksmith paired Postgres and ClickHouse for fast CI and real-time observability

Blacksmith, a CI platform founded in 2024 and now serving more than 600 organizations, needed a better way to power fast builds and real-time observability at scale. Their challenge was that Postgres worked well for transactional metadata, but it was too slow for the analytical queries needed to inspect CI logs, build history, performance metrics, and user behavior. They turned to ClickHouse to support those observability and analytics workloads.

ClickHouse provided Blacksmith with ClickHouse Cloud plus ClickPipes and the Postgres CDC connector, allowing them to stream changes from Postgres into ClickHouse in real time without complex ETL. This gave Blacksmith fast, flexible querying over terabytes of data, improved developer experience, and enabled features like step-by-step visibility, caching insights, and global log search. The result is a cleaner Postgres-plus-ClickHouse architecture that helps Blacksmith analyze data almost instantly and support 9 million jobs per month.

Blacksmith

Gabe Guerra

Head of Growth