Altinity.Cloud 101
28 April 2023 · Read time 4 min
Altinity.Cloud Introduction
Welcome to Altinity.Cloud. In this guide, we will be answering a few simple questions:
- What is Altinity.Cloud?
- What Can I Do with Altinity.Cloud?
- How is Altinity.Cloud organized?
- Where can I find out more?
What is Altinity.Cloud?
Altinity.Cloud is a fully managed ClickHouse services provider. Altinity.Cloud is the easiest way to set up a ClickHouse cluster with different configurations of shards and replicas. From one spot you can monitor performance, run queries, upload data from S3 or other cloud stores, and other essential operations.
Altinity Stable for ClickHouse
- Altinity Stable builds are production certified that include 3-years of technical support.
- This is a technical reference that provides details on Altinity.Cloud.
Altinity.Cloud Quick Start Guide
- This section is a crash course on how to create your own ClickHouse clusters with Altinity.Cloud.
Altinity.Cloud Connectivity Guide
- This section covers how to connect your existing services to Altinity.Cloud.
What Can I Do with Altinity.Cloud?
Altinity.Cloud lets you create, manage, and monitor ClickHouse clusters with a few simple clicks.
Figure 1 is a screenshot of the demo environment in the Altinity Cloud Manager user interface.
A. Cluster Creation
- Clusters can be created from scratch with Launch Cluster.
B. Clusters
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Each cluster is associated with your Altinity.Cloud account is listed in either tile format, or as a shortlist. They’ll display a summary of their health and performance. By selecting a cluster, you can view the full details.
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Clusters can be spun up and set with the number of replicas and shards, the specific version of ClickHouse that you want to run on them, and what kind of virtual machines power the nodes.
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When your clusters are running you can connect to them with the ClickHouse client, or your favorite applications like Grafana, Kafka, Tableau, and more.
C. User and Environment Management
- Change to another environment.
- Manage environments and zookeepers.
- Update account settings.
Cluster Monitoring
The performance of each Cluster is monitored in real-time with the Altinity Cluster Monitoring system. Each cluster has 32 interactive graphs, which are metrics that are created by the Altinity Cloud Manager that are displayed by Grafana.
Figure 2 - Grafana monitoring graphs.
Figure 3 - Grafana detail for CPU Time total pie chart.
Figure 4 - Grafana detail monitoring graphs for Read Bytes.
Available Metrics
Each cluster includes metrics displayed by Grafana as follows:
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| DNS and Distributed Connection Errors | Replication and ZooKeeper Exceptions | Delayed/Rejected/Pending Inserts |
| Select Queries | Read Bytes | Memory for Queries |
| Insert Queries | Bytes Inserted | Rows Inserted |
| Replication Queue Jobs | Max Replica Delay | Zookeeper Transactions |
| Merges | Merged Rows | Merged Uncompressed Bytes |
| Active Parts | Detached parts | Max Part count for Partition |
| clickhouse-server Process Memory | Primary Keys Memory | Dictionary Memory |
| Disk Space Free | Clickhouse Data size on Disk | Connections |
| Background Tasks | Mutations | Marks Cache Hit Rate |
| CPU Time per second | CPU Time total | Load Average 1m |
| Network / Disk CPU Time per second | Monitoring Agent |
Figure 5 - All of the available Grafana monitoring graphs for a cluster.
As shown in Figure 5, here are some of the metrics with descriptions.
1. DNS and Distributed Connection Errors
- Displays the rate of any connection issues.
2. Select Queries
- The number of select queries submitted to the cluster.
26. Zookeeper Transactions
- The communications between the zookeeper nodes.
19. ClickHouse Data Size on Disk
- The total amount of data the ClickHouse database is using.
How is Altinity.Cloud organized?
Organization
- Organizations have one or more environments that service your company.
- Altinity.Cloud starts at the Organization level - that’s your company. When you and members of your team log into Altinity.Cloud, they’ll start here. Depending on their access level, they can then access the different systems within the organization.
Environments
- Environments contain different clusters in a set to control access and resources.
- The next level down from there is the Environments.
Clusters
- Clusters are sets of replicas that work together to replicate data and improve performance.
- Each organization has at least one Environment, and these are used to allow users access to one or more Clusters.
Nodes
- Nodes are individual virtual machines or containers that run ClickHouse.
- Clusters consist of one or more Nodes - individual containers that run the ClickHouse databases.
Shards
- Shards are groups of nodes that work together to improve performance, and reliability, and to share data.
Replicas
- Replicas are groups of shards that mirror data and performance so when one replica goes down, they can keep going.
- Shards can then be set as replicas, where groups of nodes are copied. If one replica goes down, the other replicas can keep running and copy their synced data when the replica is restored or when a new replica is added.
Altinity.Cloud Access
Altinity.Cloud keeps your users organized in the following roles:
| Role | Environment | Cluster | |
|---|---|---|---|
| orgadmin | These users can create environments and clusters, and assign users in their organization to them. | ||
| envadmin | These users have control over the environments they are assigned to by the orgadmin. They can create clusters and control clusters within these environments. | ||
| envuser | These users can access the clusters they are specifically assigned to within specific environments. | ||
| billing | This user role can access billing the page only, view invoices, and update payment details. |
For details, see the Altinity documentation:
Where can I find out more?
Altinity provides the following resources to our customers and the Open Source community.
Altinity Documentation Site
- Official documentation on using Altinity.Cloud, Altinity Stable, and related products.
The Altinity Knowledge Base
- An Open Source and community-driven place to learn about ClickHouse configurations and answers to questions.
The Altinity Web Page
- Where you can learn about other resources, meetups, training, conferences, and more.
The Altinity Community Slack Channel
- To work with Altinity engineers and other ClickHouse users to get answers to your problems and share your solutions.
The ClickHouse Sub-Reddit
- Where the community can discuss what’s going on with ClickHouse and find answers.