Modern cloud environments generate massive volumes of telemetry (logs, metrics, traces) from every service and host. Each tool often requires its agent (e.g., Fluent Bit, Prometheus exporter, Splunk UF), which leads to the deployment and configuration of dozens or hundreds of collectors. In practice, operators end up manually editing agent configs on every node – a tedious, error-prone task. Telemetry collection at scale demands a structured control plane: tasks like upgrading agents, rotating credentials, or pushing new settings must be handled centrally. Without such a control plane, observability management becomes overwhelming and costly.

• Multiple agents and silos: Each observability tool (logging, metrics, tracing) spawns its data pipeline and agent, leading to configuration sprawl and duplicated effort.
• Resource overhead: Adding multiple collectors, one for logs, one for traces and one for metrics adds so much resource overhead.
• Manual upgrades and drift: Rolling out agent updates or policy changes requires SSH’ing into each machine or writing brittle automation.
  
  These challenges illustrate the need for a centralised way to manage observability pipelines, not just build them. While telemetry pipelines help standardise data collection and routing, deploying and operating them across a fleet is non-trivial. A control plane abstracts this operational burden by letting teams configure, deploy, and update collectors centrally. Instead of logging into each host or duplicating logic per tool, teams gain a consistent interface to manage how data is collected, transformed, and routed — all from one place.
  

CtrlB provides a unified control plane for telemetry. It centralises management across all your OpenTelemetry collectors, with no need for special agents on every host. Data from your services flows through your existing collectors, and CtrlB lets you define dynamic rules for filtering, tagging, or routing that data, all from one place. Instead of juggling configs across tools like Fluent Bit, Prometheus, or Jaeger, you gain a consistent interface to manage your observability pipelines at scale. Inspired by concepts like OpAMP, CtrlB simplifies operations so teams can update configs centrally without manual intervention on individual nodes.

Key Features of CtrlB Control Plane:

• Unified Control Across Multiple Collectors: CtrlB gives you one central control plane that talks to all your OpenTelemetry collectors. Instead of running separate agents for logs, metrics, and traces on each host, you keep your existing OTel collectors in place and let CtrlB’s control plane pull in data from all of them. That means you can manage, configure, and upgrade every collector from a single dashboard, simplifying your stack without swapping out what already works.
  
• Dynamic Multi-Destination Routing: CtrlB lets you define rule-based routing so that data is sent to multiple backends as needed. For example, error logs can be forwarded to Datadog and a security SIEM in parallel. This removes the need to run a different agent for each tool. In practice, one CtrlB pipeline can feed many destinations simultaneously.
  
• Centralised Configuration & OpenTelemetry Management: With CtrlB, you keep every pipeline configuration in one place, your control plane, so there’s no hunting through YAML files on dozens of hosts. Want to adjust how often you collect data, filter out specific information, or send your telemetry to a different destination? Simply update it once in CtrlB, and it handles the rest. We have built on the same core concepts that power the OpenTelemetry Agent Management Protocol. Apply your update once in CtrlB, and it pushes the new configuration out to every collector automatically, no manual restarts, no SSH logins, no headaches.
  
• Health Monitoring & Self-Healing: CtrlB continuously tracks the health and performance of each agent (CPU/memory usage, throughput, errors). If an agent fails or lags, CtrlB can automatically restart it. In short, it automates the essential management tasks that OpenTelemetry outlines for at-scale deployments, ensuring your pipeline stays up without human firefighting.
  
• Visual Config Builder: To avoid drowning in YAML, CtrlB offers a user-friendly UI (and CLI) for building pipelines. You can visually map data flows and transformations, instead of hand-coding complex configs. This is a huge benefit when processing terabytes of telemetry, handwritten configs quickly become unmanageable. 

CtrlB Control Plane is open source and built on open standards. It works with the existing OpenTelemetry ecosystem, ensuring you stay vendor-neutral. Because it is community-driven, contributions and custom extensions are welcome.

Next Steps

CtrlB (Telemetry Control Plane) is available now as an open-source project. It integrates with Kubernetes and Linux via containerised or packaged deployments. To get started, visit the CtrlB documentation and GitHub repository, install the control plane and set up your first pipeline. In minutes, you’ll see all your telemetry flowing through a single pane of glass, dramatically reducing operational overhead and costs.

In summary, CtrlB gives DevOps teams a unified observability pipeline and control plane, turning a mass of disjoint agents into one coherent system. By centralising log routing, agent management, and health monitoring, CtrlB helps you scale telemetry reliably and affordably. Learn more or contribute on GitHub, and take control of your observability data with CtrlB here: https://github.com/ctrlb-hq/ctrlb-control-plane