CtrlB Control Plane
Manage Telemetry Collectors at Scale
An orchestration system to manage telemetry collectors across diverse environments. Currently supports lifecycle and configuration management for the OpenTelemetry Collector.
The Challenge
Managing telemetry at scale is broken. Each observability tool deploys its own agent, creating configuration sprawl across hundreds of nodes. Manual config updates, credential rotations, and agent upgrades become operational nightmares without centralized control.
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 significant resource overhead.
Manual Upgrades and Drift
Rolling out agent updates or policy changes requires SSH'ing into each machine or writing brittle automation.
Why a Control Plane?
A control plane solves this by centralizing telemetry management. Instead of SSH'ing into every host or managing configs per tool, you get one interface to configure, deploy, and update all collectors across your entire fleet.
The Solution
CtrlB unifies telemetry management through a single control plane. It works with your existing OpenTelemetry collectors—no special agents required. Define routing rules, filters, and transformations once, then deploy them everywhere instantly. Stop juggling configs across multiple tools and start managing observability at scale.
Key Features
Everything you need to manage telemetry at scale
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.
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.
Centralized Configuration Management
Keep every pipeline configuration in one place. Update it 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, ensuring your pipeline stays up without human firefighting.
Visual Config Builder
Avoid drowning in YAML with CtrlB's user-friendly UI and CLI for building pipelines. Visually map data flows and transformations instead of hand-coding complex configs.
Open Source & Vendor Neutral
CtrlB Control Plane is open source and built on open standards. It works with the existing OpenTelemetry ecosystem, ensuring you stay vendor-neutral. Community-driven contributions and custom extensions are welcome.
Built for Scale
Monorepo with three primary components designed for scalable collector orchestration
Frontend
Modern React-based UI to visualize and manage collectors and their configurations
Backend
Go-powered API server that communicates with agents and manages configuration state
Agent
Lightweight wrapper around OpenTelemetry Collector with dynamic config fetching
Collector Communication Layer
Simple HTTP interface for agents
Configuration Manager
Tracks, versions, and delivers pipeline configs
Storage Backend
SQLite for metadata (PostgreSQL coming soon)
Authentication
Token-based auth for agent registration (in progress)