Bindplane has added an ability to orchestrate the deployment of fleets of open source OpenTelemetry collectors to its core platform for managing telemetry data.

Designed to make it simpler to manage OpenTelemetry pipelines, Bindplane also added a Blueprints capability that makes it simpler to reuse instances of validated telemetry pipelines for specific use cases.

Bindplane CEO Mike Kelly said the overall goal is to make it simpler for DevOps teams to instrument applications by making it simpler to deploy OpenTelemetry collectors at scale. The Fleets capability added to the platform, for example, makes it possible to assign a configuration file to multiple collectors that can then be deployed across a distributed computing environment.

DevOps teams can also use that same capability to automatically push version updates across an entire fleet of OpenTelemetry collectors without having to resort to manually reconfiguring each one, added Kelly.

The Bindplane platform already enables IT teams to route and observe telemetry data. The Blueprints and Fleets capabilities are among the top features that customers requested to extend the scope of the platform, said Kelly. The challenge, as always, is making it possible for DevOps teams to ensure the right telemetry data is available when needed, noted Kelly.

It’s not clear how widely OpenTelemetry collectors are being used to provide the instrumentation needed to observe software, but as the cost of deploying collectors has declined, it has become more affordable to collect telemetry data from a wider range of applications. Before the rise of OpenTelemetry, many DevOps teams limited the number of applications they would instrument because the cost of deploying the software needed to collect telemetry data was significant.

The one apparent thing is that observability and traditional IT monitoring continue to converge. In fact, in many cases, observability platforms that can be used to both analyze telemetry data and, by extension, monitor IT events, are replacing legacy IT monitoring tools that only track a comparatively narrow range of IT metrics. The challenge is that deploying and maintaining collectors at scale still requires a significant amount of DevOps expertise.

Hopefully, as OpenTelemetry is adopted not just by providers of DevOps tools and platforms by networking and security vendors as well there will be additional opportunities to unify the management of IT. One of the reasons for identifying the root cause of any issue is that every silo in the IT organization is relying on a different set of telemetry data that has to be reconciled with data collected by various other tools during one or more war room meetings that have been convened, noted Kelly.

Regardless of motivation, there will undoubtedly come a day when telemetry data is being fed into a large language model (LLM) that will enable IT teams to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to observability. In the meantime, however, IT teams will need to find a way to more easily collect and triage the massive amounts of telemetry data that will be needed to achieve that goal.