ch-ui is a lightweight web UI for ClickHouse. It gives you a table browser, a query editor, and query history — enough for ad-hoc exploration without a full monitoring setup. This post covers what it does, how to run it, and where it fits alongside chmonitor.
What ch-ui is
ch-ui (also referenced as altinity-clickhouse-web or clickhouse-web in some distributions) is an open-source browser-based interface for ClickHouse. It’s not a monitoring tool — it’s a development and exploration tool.
What it gives you:
- Query editor with result table view
- Table browser with column types and row counts
- Query history per session
What it doesn’t give you:
- Historical metrics over time
- Merge tracking
- Replication monitoring
- Multi-host dashboards
- Alerts
Running with Docker
docker run -d \
--name ch-ui \
-p 8124:8123 \
-e CLICKHOUSE_HOST=your-clickhouse-host \
-e CLICKHOUSE_PORT=8123 \
-e CLICKHOUSE_USER=default \
-e CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD=your-password \
ghcr.io/altinity/clickhouse-web:latestOpen http://localhost:8124 and you’re in the query editor.
When ch-ui is the right tool
- Ad-hoc SQL exploration against a dev/test cluster
- Quick schema inspection (what columns does this table have?)
- Running one-off diagnostic queries without SSH
- Sharing a query result with a teammate via browser
When you need more
As soon as you need to know:
- Is replication lagging right now?
- Which query consumed the most memory yesterday?
- How many parts does this table have, and is merge activity healthy?
- What does query latency look like over the last 24 hours?
…you need a monitoring tool. ch-ui shows you the current state of a query result, not trends over time.
ch-ui + chmonitor together
They complement each other well:
- ch-ui: ad-hoc queries, schema exploration, quick debugging
- chmonitor: historical metrics, merge tracking, replication monitoring, slow query ranking, multi-host overview
chmonitor gives you the time-series view that ch-ui doesn’t. ch-ui gives you the SQL scratchpad that chmonitor doesn’t.
How chmonitor complements this
chmonitor’s Queries page ranks queries by execution time and memory usage over time — the view ch-ui doesn’t provide. The Health page tracks replication, merges, and disk in a single grid for every host. The AI agent can run the same diagnostic queries you’d type into ch-ui, but across all hosts in your cluster.
Related
- Docs: Queries feature
- Docs: Health page
- Docs: Docker deployment
- Next in the series: The two kinds of ClickHouse indexes