How Critical Manufacturing uses ClickHouse to bring real-time intelligence to the factory floor

Critical Manufacturing, a global MES software provider, migrated from Microsoft SQL Server to ClickHouse Cloud to handle billions of shop-floor events with sub-second query performance. Discovered via a Reddit thread, ClickHouse was adopted after a rapid POC showed queries that took minutes on SQL Server returning in milliseconds. The platform now powers real-time analytics, equipment telemetry, observability via OpenTelemetry, and RAG-based AI workloads. Key technical optimizations include ELT over ETL, ReplacingMergeTree for deduplication of late-arriving events, denormalization to avoid costly joins, and TTL-based data lifecycle management. Next steps include migrating to replicated table engines for high availability.