Neara adopts ClickHouse ClickStack for observability

Neara has adopted ClickHouse's managed observability product, ClickStack, for its internal engineering observability stack, supporting the Australian company's software operations as it expands across utility markets in Australia, Europe and the United States.

Neara builds physics-based digital twins of electricity utility networks. Its software models infrastructure and runs simulations to identify risks such as stressed poles, insufficient ground clearance and vegetation encroachment.

Its customers include Ausgrid, Southern California Edison, ESB Networks and Scottish Power. Neara recently closed a USD $60 million Series D funding round, taking total funding to about USD $127 million.

Observability consolidation

The deployment focuses on observability, the internal monitoring of software systems through logs, metrics and traces. Neara has moved those functions onto ClickStack as it handles larger volumes of engineering and operational data.

ClickHouse supplies database and analytics software and offers ClickStack as a managed service. At Neara, the product is being used within the engineering operation rather than as part of the utility modelling platform sold to customers.

Paul Davis, Area Vice President Sales APAC at ClickHouse, outlined the impact on Neara's engineering teams.

"Since adopting ClickStack, Neara's engineering teams are resolving incidents more than 50% faster, with complete visibility across seven terabytes of observability data each month, without the cost penalties that once came with capturing data at that volume," said Paul Davis, Area Vice President Sales APAC, ClickHouse.

The change appears aimed at improving both diagnosis speed and the cost of collecting and retaining large volumes of monitoring data, a common challenge for software teams running distributed systems at scale.

Engineering shift

Neara said the move was also designed to broaden access to observability data across its engineering organisation. That can reduce reliance on a small group of specialists and allow more developers to investigate incidents directly.

Vasily Chekalkin, Neara Senior Staff Engineer, described the goal behind the shift.

"As our platform has grown, so has the complexity of running systems reliably at scale. Our goal by introducing ClickStack was to open observability across the engineering team, not just for a few specialists," said Vasily Chekalkin, Neara Senior Staff Engineer.

"ClickStack gives our engineers full visibility across logs, metrics and traces in one place, so they can drill down quickly and diagnose issues with confidence, without needing to be an observability expert or switch between multiple tools," he said.

The move reflects a broader trend in software operations as companies try to reduce tool sprawl and bring monitoring data into a single environment. For growing engineering teams, that can simplify troubleshooting and shorten response times when services fail or degrade.

Utility focus

Neara operates in a segment of the infrastructure software market drawing increasing interest from energy networks facing climate risk, ageing assets and pressure to improve resilience. Digital twin systems let operators create virtual models of physical networks and test scenarios before making field decisions.

Neara's models cover electrical utility infrastructure and are used to assess conditions across large networks. The company says it has modelled 15 million assets globally across more than 2 million miles of infrastructure.

That workload can create heavy data and compute demands, both in customer-facing modelling systems and in the internal platforms engineering teams use to run software reliably. Observability tools have become a core part of that stack because they help teams detect faults, trace system behaviour and identify performance bottlenecks.

The choice of a managed observability service also reflects a broader pattern among software companies that want to avoid maintaining more infrastructure internally as they grow. Instead of combining separate tools for logs, metrics and tracing, many are choosing consolidated products delivered as services.

For Neara, the operational backdrop is a period of international growth following its latest funding round. The observability setup is intended to help engineers manage increasing system complexity while supporting utility customers that rely on the platform for infrastructure analysis.

Davis said Neara's teams now have visibility across seven terabytes of observability data each month.