Whats new in ClickStack - June + July

The trace viewer received several usability upgrades. Each service in a waterfall now has a fixed color bar, making it easier to differentiate components at a glance. A minimap above the waterfall displays the full trace range and lets users zoom or pan by dragging, which solves the problem of losing context when focusing on a subsection. Span links from OpenTelemetry are now rendered in the detail panel, allowing direct navigation to related traces without manual ID lookup.

Metrics handling was broadened beyond ClickStack’s native store. Users can point the system at any Prometheus-compatible endpoint, enabling hybrid observability setups and easing migration from pure Prometheus stacks. Exponential histogram data now supports quantile queries, giving more expressive statistical insight without extra processing. The default metric schema was trimmed to reduce storage overhead, though existing schemas will need to be migrated if they rely on the removed fields.

Dashboard interaction was refined to behave more like a faceted search engine. Filters now affect each other, so selecting one value narrows the options in other filters, which can reduce the number of irrelevant results shown. A new tile type displays recurring event patterns, and kiosk mode locks dashboards into a read-only view suitable for wall displays. Autocomplete and dropdown lists now pull values from ClickHouse text indexes when available, improving response time compared with full table scans.

Adopting these features does not require code changes, but operators must enable the Prometheus connector and ensure their Prometheus endpoints expose compatible metrics. The text-index-based autocomplete only works where those indexes have been defined, so environments lacking them will fall back to slower scans. The leaner default schema may require schema migration for legacy dashboards that reference removed columns.

Overall, the release focuses on making trace analysis more intuitive, extending metric ingestion options, and tightening dashboard usability. For teams that already use ClickStack, the upgrades should be drop-in with minimal configuration, but they need to verify that their Prometheus sources and text indexes meet the new requirements to avoid regressions.