HyperDX
Summer 2022AcquiredOpen-source, dev-friendly observability.
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Open-source, dev-friendly observability.
Explore the risks and possibilities with a prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
HyperDX is an open-source observability product founded in 2022 by Michael Shi and Warren Lee and acquired by ClickHouse in March 2025. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, errors, and session replay around OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, and object storage. The product began as DeploySentinel, a browser-test recorder, before the team moved from debugging flaky tests to debugging production systems.[1]
This was an acquisition success, not a distress outcome. HyperDX built the ingestion, investigation interface, alerts, and session-replay layer that ClickHouse lacked. ClickHouse had already adopted the product internally, then acquired the team and made the interface central to ClickStack. Deal terms and standalone cloud status remain unresolved, while the MIT repository and ClickStack product line are active.
YC identifies Michael Shi and Warren Lee as the founders of a four-person Summer 2022 company. Shi had led developer experience at LogDNA, later Mezmo, while Lee had been the first site-reliability engineer at an earlier startup.[2] The public record does not establish when they met or their original division of responsibilities.
Shi began DeploySentinel as a side project by January 2022. Its first product was a Chrome and Firefox recorder that converted browser actions into Playwright or Puppeteer tests.[3][4] By the August 2022 Launch HN, it had become an end-to-end testing service focused on flaky tests and maintenance, a problem Shi had encountered in a prior job.[5]
The pivot preserved the debugging mission while widening its surface. The founders had repeatedly jumped among Bugsnag, LogRocket, and CloudWatch, manually carrying identifiers and timestamps between tools to find one root cause. In May 2023, Shi rebranded the suite as HyperDX so continuous-integration and production debugging could live in one product.[6]
HyperDX chose ClickHouse as its database from the beginning and made open source a distribution principle. Explaining the permissive license, Shi wrote, “We want to make observability accessible.”[2] The corpus preserves one exact founder quote suitable for reproduction, not the two requested by the canonical format. No second founder quote is invented.
HyperDX combined logs, traces, errors, session replay, and early metrics in one investigation interface. OpenTelemetry supplied vendor-neutral collection. ClickHouse supplied columnar search. S3 supplied object storage. Trace and session identifiers correlated signals so an engineer could move from a browser replay to a backend span or matching log without copying timestamps across products.[2]
The user flow started with Lucene-style search or optional SQL, continued through native JSON and live tailing, and turned a useful query into an alert or dashboard. Current capabilities include APM and correlation across OpenTelemetry data.[12]
The product differentiated on investigation workflow, self-hosting, and cost. Shi said a Datadog estimate had approached the company's AWS bill and presented HyperDX as nine times cheaper. YC later claimed savings of up to ten times, without workload assumptions.[6][1]
HyperDX Local reduced setup friction by putting the collector, database, and interface in one container. After acquisition, ClickStack formalized that same stack. By March 2026, ClickHouse 26.2 could embed the HyperDX-derived interface directly in the database binary for system logs and metrics.[13]
HyperDX targeted engineering teams that wanted correlated production debugging without Datadog-scale pricing or separate tools for logs, traces, replay, and alerts. Self-hosting appealed to teams that wanted infrastructure control. The live site still shows $0.40 per gigabyte with no user or host fee, but the status of new standalone-cloud signup is unclear.[14]
No verified revenue, ARR, paid-customer count, contract value, retention, or cloud-to-self-hosted conversion data was found. A Lovable testimonial confirms use, not paid scope.[15] ClickHouse's claim that internal LogHouse exceeded 100 petabytes and 500 trillion rows shows buyer-reported deployment scale, not HyperDX market share.[16]
HyperDX positioned against Datadog, New Relic, and CloudWatch on cost and investigation flow. Launch discussion also identified SigNoz, Highlight, OpenObserve, Sentry, and Uptrace.[2] Thoughtworks placed HyperDX among modern observability tools in its April 2024 Technology Radar, giving it independent category recognition.[17]
HyperDX did not own its database primitive. That dependency could have been a weakness, but it became strategic complementarity. ClickHouse concluded that a database alone was insufficient and that HyperDX supplied ingestion, interface, alerts, investigation, and replay.[9]
The company kept its self-hosted edition broadly featured and monetized managed cloud and enterprise support. The live site's ingestion price supports usage-based cloud packaging, although current standalone availability is unresolved.[14]
LinkedIn reports a $500,000 YC pre-seed in October 2022. No primary announcement confirms the amount or terms.[18] No verified revenue, margins, burn, runway, profitability, cap table, founder ownership, or dilution evidence was found.
ClickHouse and HyperDX disclosed no purchase price, valuation, cash or stock mix, earn-out, retention package, founder proceeds, or other terms. March 13 supports a public completed-deal announcement, but the record does not establish whether that date was legal close.[9]
The strongest early signal was community response. DeploySentinel's 56-point launch became HyperDX's 722-point open-source launch. By July 2026, the active MIT repository showed 9,670 stars, 423 forks, and same-day code activity, with version 2.30.1 released the prior day.[12][11]
Post-deal traction is product survival. ClickStack's launch received 241 Hacker News points and 83 comments. Managed ClickStack reached general availability by May 2026, and its current page still names HyperDX as the user interface.[19]
HyperDX was acquired without public evidence of distress. Its success came from a pivot, an application-layer asset, and a buyer that had become a user.
DeploySentinel attacked flaky browser tests. HyperDX kept the root-cause mission but expanded into production, where logs, traces, replay, and alerts sit inside recurring infrastructure budgets. The change in Hacker News response, from 56 to 722 points, does not prove revenue, but it shows a much stronger developer pull.
HyperDX used ClickHouse from the beginning. ClickHouse later tested the version-two interface over its internal LogHouse estate and saw that HyperDX completed the product surface its database lacked. The relationship included architecture, internal adoption, and community contact at KubeCon and San Francisco meetups. No evidence shows a prior ClickHouse investment, ownership stake, exclusive partnership, or incubation.[15]
ClickHouse promised, “This acquisition is an acceleration, not a disruption.”[9] Subsequent evidence supports that claim: ClickStack launched in May 2025, entered hosted preview in August, absorbed HyperDX as its UI identity, embedded that UI in ClickHouse, and reached managed general availability in 2026.
The remaining ambiguity concerns the standalone cloud, not product survival. The old login surface failed during research, but no official retirement notice was found. The safe conclusion is that MIT open source and ClickStack survive; historical cloud contracts and standalone signup do not have a confirmed status.