Chapter 5: Full-Stack Observability — Vector, ClickHouse, and Distributed Tracing at Scale
Previous Chapter: Chapter 4 — Database Scalability: From MySQL to TiDB | Series Hub Answer-first: Shopee conquered telemetry scale challenges by replacing bloated Elasticsearch clusters with a high-throughput observability pipeline powered by Vector SIMD daemons, Apache Kafka, and ClickHouse columnar storage. Incorporating OpenTelemetry tail-based sampling and non-invasive eBPF continuous profiling slashes storage overhead by twelve times while retaining all system errors and anomalies with sub-one-percent runtime CPU impact. Prerequisite: Solid understanding of observability telemetry models (metrics, logs, traces), columnar database indexing (ClickHouse MergeTree), OpenTelemetry trace context propagation (W3C), and Linux kernel profiling with eBPF. ...