Orb is a new kind of observability platform that helps operators, developers, and end users understand their networks, distributed applications, and traffic flows in real time.

Ready to dive in? See getorb.io for installation instructions.

Orb manages a fleet of agents deployed across distributed, hybrid infrastructure: containers, VMs, servers, routers and switches. The agent taps into traffic streams and extracts real time insights, resulting in light-weight, actionable metrics.

Based on the pktvisor observability agent, Orb's goal is to push analysis to the edge, where high resolution data can be analysed in real time without the need to send raw data to a central location for batch processing. Current analysis focuses on L2-L3 Network, DNS, and DHCP with more analyzers in the works.

Orb uses IoT principals to allow the observability agents to connect out to the Orb central control plane, avoiding firewall problems. Once connected, agents are controlled in real time from the Orb Portal or REST API, orchestrating observability policies designed to precisely extract the desired insights. Agents are grouped and addressed based on tags.

Orb was built to integrate with modern observability stacks, supporting Prometheus natively and designed to support arbitrary sinks in the future. Collection and sinking of the metrics from the agents is included; there is no need to run additional data collection pipelines for Orb metrics.

Orb includes a modern, responsive UI for managing Agents, Agent Groups, Policies and Sinks. Orb is API first, and all platform functionality is available for automation via the well documented REST API.

Orb is free, open source software (FOSS) released under MPL. It's a modern microservices application that can be deployed to any Kubernetes service in private or public cloud. It does not depend on any one vendor to function, thus avoiding vendor lock-in.

Orb was born at NS1 Labs, where we're committed to making open source, dynamic edge observability a reality .

• Installation Instructions
• View our Wiki for technical and architectural information
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