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Telescope – an open-source web-based log viewer for logs stored in ClickHouse

Telescope – an open-source web-based log viewer for logs stored in ClickHouse

27 comments

·February 26, 2025
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r0b3r4

Hey everyone!

I’m working Telescope - an open-source web-based log viewer designed to make working with logs stored in ClickHouse easier and more intuitive.

I wasn’t happy with existing log viewers - most of them force a specific log format, are tied to ingestion pipelines, or are just a small part of a larger platform. Others didn’t display logs the way I wanted.

So I decided to build my own lightweight, flexible log viewer - one that actually fits my needs.

Check it out:

    Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IItMOXwugY

    GitHub: https://github.com/iamtelescope/telescope

    Live demo: https://telescope.humanuser.net

    Discord: https://discord.gg/rXpjDnEc

akdor1154

Cool! I'm currently playing with the Grafana Clickhouse connector to do broadly similar - are these compatible? Can Telescope read an OTEL logs table in Clickhouse?

r0b3r4

Yes, this is exactly where Telescope can be useful (and actually, the way Grafana displays logs was my motivation for writing my own viewer)

Telescope can work with any table in ClickHouse. Of course, not every single ClickHouse type has been tested, but there shouldn’t be any issues with the most common ones

If you want, you can check how it works with the OTEL schema in the live demo here: https://telescope.humanuser.net/sources/otel-demo/explore

piterrro

There's also Logdy (https://github.com/logdyhq/logdy-core) that can work with raw files and comes with a UI as well in a single precompiled binary so no need for installs and setups. If you're looking for a simple solution for browsing log files with a web UI, this might be it! (I'm the author)

tacker2000

Looks cool I might try it out!

I need a central place, something simple where I can actually read the contents of the logs that are generated by the dozen of services that I run for clients, etc… instead of stupidly SSH’ing to every server.

Does this fit the use case?

I tried Loki once but it was painful to set up and more geared toward aggregating events and stats.

piterrro

I'm author of Logdy: https://logdy.dev/ https://github.com/logdyhq/logdy-core It comes as a precompiled binary you can download/deploy on the server and use to browse larger log files. I suggest you take a look!

r0b3r4

Thanks! Telescope is more focused on displaying logs and providing access to them rather than handling log ingestion. In the future, I plan to support various sources like Docker, k8s, and files to improve the local development workflow. However, it's unlikely that Telescope will support fetching logs from remote servers via SSH, as that's not its primary use case.

homebrewer

Graylog is a pretty standard solution to your problems (I believe), although they've been closing down their licensing more and more as time goes on.

iwanhae

I’m curious to know what makes the Loki installation process so painful.

I’m interested in learning more about the software installation experience.

samsk

Only problematic thing might be relatively frequent storage changes (like they like to deprecate primary storage driver), otherwise its IMHO easy to setup. I'm running it on several projects, because it doesn't needs beefy machine like Elastic or even ClickHouse.

perteraul

genuinely wondering if https://multiplayer.app would work for you.

note: I'm part of the Multiplayer team.

darkstar_16

I like how this is mostly based on the Kibana UI. Makes easier to convince other people to move to it.

r0b3r4

To be honest, I was more inspired by DataDog :)

danmur

I've used graylog the most so that's what it looks like to me :P. I like how you can do a bunch of extraction stuff right there in the query interface though, that's awesome. It seems like a very thoughtful UI.

Dowwie

It can display logs in-context. Awesome!

VectorLock

Look out, Kibana, they're gunning for you!

new_user_final

Rollbar has a feature to upload JavaScript sourcemaps files. When I am viewing logs from minified js files, it automatically apply sourcemaps and correctly shows line number.

Is there any open source tool that does the same?

vortegne

Unfortunate name choice, as @csh602 mentioned

Viewer looks pretty good though. Reminds me of DataDog UI, but not as slow. Will play around more, thanks!

r0b3r4

As we all know, naming is an unsolvable problem in IT :)

Regarding performance - 95% of Telescope's speed depends on how fast your ClickHouse responds. If you have a well-optimized schema and use the right indexes, Telescope's overhead will be minimal.

csh602

Looks simple and clean! Big ups for starts of good screenshots, docs, and quickstart (Docker) instructions.

Regarding the name, "Telescope" is also the name of a Neovim fuzzy finder[0] that dominates the ecosystem there. Other results appear by searching "telescope github".

[0]: https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim

r0b3r4

Well, every single name I came up with was already taken and present in GitHub. So...

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throwaw12

This one seems to be optimized for log viewing at the moment, are there any DataDog alternatives built on top of Clickhouse, which supports full range of OpenTelemetry features?

Cnidarias

There are these guys which are based on OTEL: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

puppion

There is lumigo, also based on Clickhouse https://lumigo.io/

perteraul

I think https://multiplayer.app would also fit your description.

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