otelc

You may know Norton Commander, but do you know OTel Commander? As a infra or platform engineer, SRE, devops, you oftentimes need to deploy, scale, and troubleshoot a fleet of OpenTelemetry collectors. The OTel Commander otelc helps you to do this. It connects over Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) to OTel collectors, allowing you to view, edit, visualize their configuration and get health insights incl. metrics and logs:

See docs/design/mockups.md for all screens.

Status

Working prototype covering: The embedded OpAMP server, the OTLP receiver, collector config push, restart, and the pipeline graph all work end-to-end. See docs/design/ for the design and the roadmap including component-level edits and probing (think OTTL), config diff, TLS/mTLS, and a concrete external-server adapter.

Build

To build the tool, you need a stable Rust toolchain and protoc (the protobuf compiler, used by prost-build; the OpAMP .proto itself is vendored under proto/).

To install protoc, do:

# Debian/Ubuntu:
apt-get install -y protobuf-compiler

# macOS:
brew install protobuf

Then you can build as follows:

cargo build --release

Run

otelc runs an embedded OpAMP server by default. Collectors or their OpAMP supervisors connect to it.

otelc # OpAMP on ws://127.0.0.1:4320, OTLP on :4317
otelc --listen 0.0.0.0:4320 --otlp-listen 0.0.0.0:4317
otelc --config otelc.example.yaml
otelc --mode external --external-url http://my-opamp-server:8080

Try it without a real collector

The mock-agent example simulates a fleet of OpenTelemetry Collectors — they connect over OpAMP, report a realistic multi-pipeline config and health, apply remote-config offers, honor restart commands, and push OTLP own-telemetry.

In one terminal:

cargo run --release --bin otelc

In another:

cargo run --release --bin mock-agent -- --count 3

The three agents appear in the Fleet panel. Press Tab to focus the right panel, 1–6 to switch its view (Fleet / Config / Pipeline / Metrics / Logs / Health), F4 to edit an agent's config and F5 to push it, F6 to restart an agent, F1 for help, F10 to quit.

Use a real OpAMP Supervisor

Point an OpAMP Supervisor at the embedded server by setting, in supervisor.yaml:

server:
  endpoint: ws://127.0.0.1:4320/v1/opamp
capabilities:
  accepts_remote_config: true
  reports_own_metrics: true
  reports_own_logs: true

Project layout

crates/otelc-opamp   OpAMP wire types, WebSocket framing, embedded OpAMP server
crates/otelc-otlp    Embedded OTLP/gRPC receiver + bounded telemetry store
crates/otelc-tui     The `otelc` binary: Norton Commander TUI + ControlPlane
examples/mock-agent  Simulated collector fleet for end-to-end testing
proto/               Vendored OpAMP protobuf schema
docs/design/         High-level design, detailed design, UI mockups

Test

cargo test --workspace      # framing, OpAMP server round-trip, store, pipeline parser
cargo clippy --workspace

License

MIT — see LICENSE.