--- title: "ClickHouse vs Prometheus for High Cardinality, Part 1: Understanding the Problem" url: https://daily.dev/posts/clickhouse-vs-prometheus-for-high-cardinality-part-1-understanding-the-problem-jfrzmntpc source_url: https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-vs-promethous-high-cardinality-p1-understanding-the-problem type: article source: "ClickHouse" published: 2026-05-18T12:53:29.033Z updated: 2026-05-18T12:53:56.505Z tags: ["observability", "prometheus", "clickhouse"] reading_time: 15 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # ClickHouse vs Prometheus for High Cardinality, Part 1: Understanding the Problem **[ClickHouse](https://daily.dev/sources/clickhouse)** · 15 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary High cardinality is a well-known pain point in Prometheus and similar series-oriented time-series databases. This post explains why: every unique label combination creates an independent time series, each carrying its own in-memory structure (memSeries), inverted index entries, and chunk overhead. As cardinality grows — especially with ephemeral labels like container_id or pod_id in Kubernetes — memory consumption scales linearly, ingestion slows due to repeated series creation, and broad queries become expensive because Prometheus must decode full chunks across many posting lists. Teams typically respond by stripping labels, increasing scrape intervals, or capping series counts, all of which reduce observability fidelity. The post sets up a follow-on piece explaining how ClickHouse's columnar storage model handles these same workloads differently. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [ClickHouse vs Prometheus for High Cardinality, Part 2: Cardinality in ClickHouse](https://daily.dev/posts/clickhouse-vs-prometheus-for-high-cardinality-part-2-cardinality-in-clickhouse-k1csgiom4) · ClickHouse · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [High Cardinality Metrics: How Prometheus and ClickHouse Handle Scale](https://daily.dev/posts/high-cardinality-metrics-how-prometheus-and-clickhouse-handle-scale-o0heii5ky) · Last9 · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The InfluxDB Cardinality Problem: Why High-Cardinality Industrial Data Breaks It](https://daily.dev/posts/the-influxdb-cardinality-problem-why-high-cardinality-industrial-data-breaks-it-szpfxjauu) · CrateDB · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The cost of knowledge](https://daily.dev/posts/the-cost-of-knowledge-yign5zfjs) · Coralogix · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability), [#prometheus](https://daily.dev/tags/prometheus), [#clickhouse](https://daily.dev/tags/clickhouse) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/clickhouse-vs-prometheus-for-high-cardinality-part-1-understanding-the-problem-jfrzmntpc)