Best tool for the job

Engineering teams often stretch existing platforms like Elasticsearch beyond their original purpose rather than adopting better-suited tools, leading to high costs and complexity. ClickHouse and similar OLAP databases offer significant cost savings for log analytics (reportedly ~20x cheaper than Elastic), but migrating away from the full ELK stack means losing its rich ecosystem of dashboards and integrations. Quesma proposes a translation/interoperability layer that lets teams keep Kibana and the Elastic stack frontend while storing data in cheaper backends like ClickHouse, Snowflake, or AWS Athena — similar to an approach Uber implemented in-house.