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ClickHouse employees have no access to your data by default. Your ClickHouse data, including all user tables and query results, stays inside your VPC. The only paths by which ClickHouse interacts with your deployment are described below — none of them grant access to customer table data.

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Routine operations

ClickHouse Cloud’s control plane runs your BYOC deployment without reading customer data. The components that send data out of your VPC carry only operational metadata:
ComponentWhat leaves your VPC
State exporterService state (health, status) to an SQS queue owned by ClickHouse Cloud.
Billing scraperCPU and memory metrics to an S3 bucket owned by ClickHouse Cloud.
AlertManagerCluster health alerts to ClickHouse Cloud.
Query traffic, table contents, and schemas never flow through these channels. Logs and metrics stay inside your BYOC VPC.

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Troubleshooting access

When ClickHouse engineers need to diagnose a problem in your deployment, they request just-in-time access through an internal escalation and approval workflow. Approved access is granted via a time-bound certificate and routed over Tailscale — never the public internet.

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What engineers can see

With approved troubleshooting access, engineers can read ClickHouse system tables only. This includes:
  • system.query_log — query text and execution metadata for queries run against your service
  • system.tables, system.columns, and similar system tables — schema and metadata
  • Other system.* tables used for diagnostics (e.g., parts, mutations, replicas)

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What engineers can’t see

Engineers can’t read customer user tables. Access is scoped to system tables only.

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How access is enforced

  • Approval required: every access request goes through an internal approval system with designated approvers. Engineers can’t self-grant access.
  • Time-bound certificates: a temporary, time-bound certificate is generated per approved session. Access expires automatically.
  • Certificate-based authentication: certificates replace password-based access for all human access to BYOC instances.
  • Read-only on system tables: the certificate identity is scoped to system table reads.
  • No data exported: logs and query results from troubleshooting sessions are never exported back to ClickHouse infrastructure.

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Auditing

Engineer activity is visible to you and audited by ClickHouse:
  • Customer-visible: every query a ClickHouse engineer runs on your instance appears in your own system.query_log, including the query text and the certificate identity. You can audit this from your ClickHouse service directly.
  • ClickHouse-side: ClickHouse’s security team internally logs and audits all access requests, approvals, and Tailscale connections.

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Future controls

Customer-controlled approval — where you approve each engineer access request before it takes effect — is on the roadmap. Today, approval is handled through ClickHouse’s internal escalation process.