Once OTel collectors are deployed and operational in an environment, common “day 1” management concerns must be addressed. These include:

• Centralizing and understanding collector health
• Provisioning and maintaining configurations across the fleet
• Visualizing the expected results
• Ensuring configurations are realizing the cost, insight and agility benefits expected

In short, answering the question “how do I know it’s working?” While various custom (IaC) scripts and glue can be created to manage OTel configurations, they too must be maintained, and can make change controls and updates cumbersome, limiting agility at scale.

ControlTheory puts you back in control of your OTel collectors, by adhering to open standards, centralizing control and providing innovative visualization of your fleet. While OTel can be complex, managing your fleet doesn’t have to be.

As you’ve embraced open standards and adopted the OTel collector for your data plane, the last thing you want is a proprietary control plane to manage them – no “roach OTels” here! Completely based on Open standards, ControlTheory leverages the upstream contrib collector, supporting more than 200+ existing sources, destinations and processors. It also embraces OpAMP (Open Agent Management Protocol) as part of the OTel specification, enabling you to manage the health of, and control your fleet at scale, whilst adhering to open protocols and standards.

The ControlTheory management console provides a single global view of your fleet and inventory, allowing you to centralize collector health monitoring and streamline configuration management. Understand the key health metrics and resources for your collectors and quickly pinpoint collectors that have issues. Get validation for proposed configuration changes and pipelines ahead of time, and leverage Elastic Telemetry Pipelines (TM), to spin up, spin down or adjust pipelines without the need for complex scripts and time consuming change controls, (or source code changes) all from a single simple UI.

Meet your organization where it’s at, with built-in support for Docker and Kubernetes collector deployments. Track and audit configuration changes to your fleet with “deployments”, and partition collectors and the policies applied to them into “Control Planes”, respecting the privacy and organizational boundaries specific to your company’s deployments and teams.

Go beyond YAML, with simple built-in visualizations of your configurations and pipelines. Visually understand your sources, destinations, processors (transformations) and how they tie into different pipelines for your logs, metrics and traces. Get visual insight into both how your pipelines are configured, and the state or MetaMetrics (TM) of the telemetry data flowing through them. Visually understand your collector configurations and the impact on your telemetry flows. Show your development and engineering teams where their telemetry goes and why, and show your boss and CFO how your configurations are cutting costs and improving observability insights and outcomes.

Observability is going through an era of unprecedented change, with moves to open standards based approaches and AI. The OTel collector is a powerful tool to cut costs, improve insights and gain agility in the face of these changes. But fleet management is an essential element to manage the collectors and their configurations at scale, so that the benefits of these ongoing consolidations and migrations to open standards can be realized.