Get Ctrl over your trace data

Adaptive trace sampling - Identify and retain valuable traces at the edge to optimize your observability data and maximize cost-savings. Focus on the golden signals with APM dashboards and anomaly detection. Tune sampling policy through actionable insights and more!

Actionable insights.: Tune sampling policy with the click of a button (or enable automation). Respond to incidents and performance issues – look at the right data.
Performance metrics.: Request, Error, and Duration (R.E.D) metrics for your services. Dashboards and tools to inform sampling decisions, performance optimization, and accelerate incident response.
Machine learning.: Discover anomalies and outliers, identify incidents, and streamline root cause analysis. Fix performance regressions before they impact your users.
Remote configuration.: Install an agent and remotely manage it, no need to maintain local YAML configuration, K8s ConfigMaps, etc. Agent groups make it easy to manage multiple agents.
Powerful policies.: Sample traces on duration, attributes (e.g. service, team, etc.), status code, rate, percentage, and more! Combine policies to extract all of the value and none of the cruft from your trace data.
Save money.: Don't waste time and money on the wrong observability data. Let TailCtrl get the most from your distributed traces so your team can focus on making a great product.

Every trace stored is
worthy of your attention.

Experience distributed tracing at it's best. By identifying and retaining traces that suggest issues, TailCtrl gives you the super power to be proactive and prevent them from adversely affecting your users.

From the blog

Learn how to get the most from your distributed traces.

Mar 7, 2024 Integration

Making the Most of Grafana Cloud's Free Tier

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed cloud-hosted observability platform ideal for cloud native environments. It's a tightly integrated stack for metrics, logs, and distributed traces. While anyone can download Grafana's open source software and run it, it can be a challenge to setup and maintain the whole stack. Self-hosting becomes even less attractive when you consider Grafana Cloud's wonderful "Free Forever" plan with generous usage limits, such as 50GB for traces with 14-day retention!

Make the most of that free 50GB with TailCtrl – only traces of interest will be sent to Grafana Cloud!

Mar 8, 2024 Documentation

Getting Started With TailCtrl

This post explains how to send OpenTelemetry traces to a TailCtrl agent. We aim to make the process as smooth as possible - it can be broken down into three steps.

1. Deploy a TailCtrl agent

2. Instrument a service with OpenTelemetry

3. Configure the instrumentation's exporter

Frequently asked questions

Who is TailCtrl for?: Anyone looking to adopt or scale OpenTelemetry distributed tracing. Teams looking to reduce their observability backend and related network bandwidth bills.
What's the mission?: Make it easy to adopt and scale OpenTelemetry distributed tracing. Empower people with the best cloud-native observability tooling to wrangle software in 2024.
What problems does TailCtrl solve?: With distributed tracing, you observe requests as they move from one service to another in a distributed system. A well (or automatically) instrumented set of services can produce a tremendous amount of data. TailCtrl makes tail sampling easy to deploy and manage, turning the tremendous amount of data into a gentle stream of selected traces of interest. By capturing application performance metrics generated from all of the trace data, TailCtrl is able to provide a holistic view of your services, and drive adaptive tail sampling policy.
Which observability backends are supported?: TailCtrl can currently send sampled traces to any backend that supports OTLP. Vendor specific exporters will be added soon.
How much does it cost?: Nothing! At least while it's in preview. In the future, its cost will be dwarfed by the reduction in your observability backend bill.