What's new in ClickStack - September and October '26

A searchable, faster filter sidebar

With recent changes, hopefully finding a key in a long list of attributes should be a little less tedious now. Map groups such as LogAttributes and ResourceAttributes have their own key search, much like the value search on regular filters. Each Map column also gets its own key fetch limit, so hundreds of log attributes won't push ResourceAttributes out of the sidebar.

We've also stopped making the whole sidebar wait for its slowest query. Filter values appear as each query finishes. Over longer time ranges, you'll see keys first and values filling in as they arrive, so you can start filtering while the rest load.

Alerting improvements

We've kept investing in alerting based on what you need and ask for, so please keep the feedback coming.

Alerts straight from the chart explorer

Want an alert without creating a dashboard tile you'll never look at? Previously, every alert needed a saved search for logs or a dashboard tile for metrics. That's a lot of extra housekeeping if you're bringing over a thousand Grafana rules.

You can now build a chart in the explorer using logs, traces, or metrics, with either the query builder or raw SQL, and add an alert directly. The alert stores its own chart configuration and appears on the alerts page with a chart icon. Follow its link back to the explorer, and the query is ready for you to inspect or edit.

Richer webhook templates

Grouped alerts can now tell you which group needs attention. Use {{var.<column>}} to include the breaching group's value for any group-by column. For example, {"summary": "{{var.ServiceName}} has an elevated error rate"} names the service in each notification. Those values are included in resolve notifications too.

Alert tags are also available through {{tags}}. This came from a user who needed to route alerts to the right team through a shared incident.io webhook.

We've also added a few ways to catch template mistakes before an alert needs to fire. Errors appear in the webhook editor as you type, and the API rejects bodies that don't compile. For automated workflows, POST /api/v2/webhooks/validate checks a webhook configuration without saving it, handy during a Terraform plan. The editor also lists every available variable with a description, and Send test populates them with sample values.

MCP server improvements

We've been putting the ClickStack MCP server through its paces in production and our evaluation suite. Watching where agents get stuck, or take the long way round, has given us plenty to work on.

A service health report in one call

"How are my services doing?" sounds like a simple question. Previously, answering it took an agent several calls to fetch tables and time series and then piece the results together.

The new clickstack_service_health tool returns throughput, error rate, latency percentiles, and top error groups for every service in one call. It compares results with the same window yesterday and highlights unhealthy services and new or growing errors. In our service-health-check evaluation, agents scored higher while using about half as many tool calls.

We'll keep investing in tools that help agents get investigations off to a good start, wasting fewer tokens gathering context and making investigations more consistent and efficient, with the aim of resolving issues faster.

Behavior hints and server metadata

We've also filled in a few details that help MCP clients work with the server. Every tool now declares all four behavior hints: whether it's read-only, destructive, idempotent, and open-world. Clients use these hints when deciding which calls need approval, and some compatibility checks require all four.

The server now includes a title, description, website, and icon in its initialize response too, so MCP directories and clients have the details they need when listing it.

StatsD and span metrics in the collector

If your application already uses StatsD to count failed payments, track queue sizes, or measure how long a job takes, you shouldn't have to rewrite that instrumentation to use ClickStack. The ClickStack collector now includes a StatsD receiver, so you can send those metrics straight to it. It also understands DogStatsD tags, making this useful for applications currently sending custom metrics to Datadog.

We've also added a span metrics connector for a different but related job: turning traces into metrics. Traces describe individual requests, but you often want an overview of how many requests a service handles, how many fail, and how long they take. The connector generates call counts and latency histograms from incoming spans, including traces from the Datadog Agent, so you can build those views without adding separate metrics instrumentation.

Together, these additions let you bring existing application metrics into ClickStack and generate service metrics from the traces you're already collecting. For teams moving from Datadog, that means less instrumentation work up front and more room to migrate gradually. You can compare metrics across both systems and rebuild dashboards before switching anything off.

Both components are opt-in and configured through a custom pipeline using CUSTOM_OTELCOL_CONFIG_FILE. The span metrics connector emits traces.span.metrics.calls and traces.span.metrics.duration, with support for exponential histograms that ClickStack stores natively.

Line chart interpolation

Want to see the total and which services contribute most, without adding up the lines yourself? Time series tiles now support a stacked line display alongside stacked bars. Each series has a filled area, stacked on the others, so you can see both the overall trend and the individual contributions.

You can also choose how lines connect between points with the line interpolation setting: smooth, linear, or step. Step is handy for values that change in discrete jumps, such as the number of running replicas. The setting is available in the app, the external API, and the MCP server.

Little but useful things

Tile alerts in the Terraform export

The Terraform export previously skipped alerts that weren't attached to a saved search. Dashboard tile alerts are now included, using the source \= "tile" form added in version 3.28.0 of the ClickHouse Terraform provider.

Tile descriptions

Dashboard tiles can now have a description explaining what they show or how to read them. Set it next to the chart name in the tile editor, and it appears as an info tooltip beside the tile title. Descriptions are also supported through the external API.

Minimum auto granularity on metric sources

When you zoom into a chart, auto-granularity may choose buckets smaller than the metric's scrape interval. A metric collected once a minute might appear in 30-second buckets, leaving every other bucket empty and making the chart look like data is missing. To avoid this, you can now set Minimum auto granularity under Team Settings → Sources to keep automatic buckets at least as wide as your scrape interval. Tiles with an explicit granularity are unaffected.

PromQL sources also have a Minimum auto granularity setting to prevent short time ranges from producing buckets finer than your scrape interval. This value is also used to calculate $__rate_interval, which otherwise assumes a 15-second scrape interval.

Pick any time zone

The Use UTC time switch in User Preferences is now a time zone picker, with Local and UTC pinned at the top and all browser-supported zones below. The sidebar badge and timestamp column headers show your selected zone.

Label each instance

Running several ClickStack instances, perhaps one per region? Set NEXT_PUBLIC_INSTANCE_LABEL to a short label such as "UK". It appears in the browser tab title and sidebar, making it easier to find the right instance in a sea of tabs.

A configurable external API rate limit

You can now set the cap on /api/v2/* requests with EXTERNAL_API_RATE_LIMIT_MAX, giving busy integrations or export jobs more room. The default remains 100 requests per minute.

Faster metric name picker

Metric names now stream from the table's primary index instead of waiting for an aggregation over the data. On sources with thousands of metrics, the first options appear in tens of milliseconds. Typing searches exhaustively, so you can still find any metric the index leaves out.

Consistent dashboard refresh loading states

Number, bar, pie, table, and heatmap tiles now keep their previous data visible and pulse while refreshing, just as time charts already did. You can see when an update is still in progress without losing the current results. Thanks to the community for this contribution.

Live tail presets up to 6h

Live tail now supports 3h and 6h presets, up from the previous one-hour limit. Longer ranges remain disabled, with an explanation in the picker: each refresh re-queries the whole window.

Alerts page pagination

The alerts page now loads one page at a time with server-side filtering, rather than fetching every alert into the browser. Teams with thousands of alerts can filter by state, name, and tags without slowing the page down.

Conclusion

That's it for September and October. Give the new features a try and let us know how you get on.

One thing to check before upgrading a self-hosted deployment: if authentication is enabled, you must now set EXPRESS_SESSION_SECRET explicitly. The API no longer falls back to a public default.

A big thank you to everyone who's shared feedback, reported a rough edge, or sent a pull request. You've helped shape much of what's covered here. Keep it coming, and let us know what you'd like to see next.