When evaluating Apache Doris(
https://doris.apache.org/), Elasticsearch, or ClickHouse for observability, you're really deciding how to handle massive volumes of fast-moving, constantly evolving data.
Four questions teams should ask:
1️⃣ How much will it cost to store all this data?
→ Elasticsearch: Storage-heavy indexes, most expensive.
→ ClickHouse: Good compression, may require more tuning.
→ Apache Doris: Very high compression, 50–80% cheaper than Elasticsearch. Also offers storage-compute separation, hot data on cloud disks and cold data in object storage.
2️⃣ Can it ingest data in real time?
→ Elasticsearch: slows under high throughput ingest
→ ClickHouse: strong ingest
→ Apache Doris: 10 GB/s real-time ingest, handling PB-scale observability data daily
3️⃣ Can it search text fast and run complex analytics?
→ Elasticsearch: built its name in full-text search, slower analytics
→ ClickHouse: good in analytics, text search still experimental
→ Apache Doris: great in analytics and full-text search. Offer inverted indexes + columnar engine → 3–10x faster full-text search than ClickHouse and 6–21x better aggregation performance than Elasticsearch.
4️⃣ Will the schema break as logs evolve?
→ Elasticsearch: uses dynamic mapping, but type conflicts are painful
→ ClickHouse: schema changes require planning
→ Apache Doris: provides flexible schema with VARIANT data type, supports changing field type as data changes and large-scale JSON analytics.
🔗 See demo on OpenTelemetry + Apache Doris + Grafana:
https://lnkd.in/geS-WNty