PostHog's architecture

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On this page

This section covers PostHog's data model, ingestion pipeline, ClickHouse setup and data querying. This page provides an overview of how PostHog is structured.

Broad overview

There are only a few systems to consider.

  • A website and API for users
  • An API for client apps
  • A plugin service for processing events on ingestion
  • A worker service for processing events in response to triggers

Zooming closer

Adding detail reveals the flow between parts of the system.

Zoomed right in

No communication is needed into or out of this namespace other than the ingress controller for the app and collecting data.

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Data model

This provides a high-level overview of the various objects and primitives that make up the PostHog data model. The two most basic entities in PostHog are the event and person objects. They represent the core of our analytics functionalities. Further reading: How data is stored in ClickHouse Event An event is the most important object in PostHog. It represents a single action that a user performed at a specific point in time. These events are sent either from one of our SDKs or…

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