Happy New Year!

Winter has fully set in at Bindplane’s Michigan-based headquarters, but we’re keeping warm with the excitement from this piping-hot announcement and accompanying release. It’s just the thing to ignite the hearts, minds, and typing fingers (?) of our team and observability professionals as we kick off 2025.

New Name. New Logo. Same Mission.

First, observIQ is officially no more. As of today, we’ve rebranded as Bindplane (https://www.bindplane.com), aligning our identity with our flagship product and doubling down on our mission to build a powerful, OpenTelemetry-native telemetry pipeline.

As a team, we’re excited to embrace 2025 as Bindplane while continuing to deliver exceptional value to our customers.

Winter '25 Release

In addition to the new name and logo, Bindplane’s Winter Release contains several exciting features:

1. Bindplane Agent is now BDOT Collector

To kick things off: the Bindplane Agent is now officially known as the Bindplane Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector (“BDOT Collector” for short). Built with the OCB, the BDOT Collector aligns with OTel’s updated naming conventions and also marks the inclusion of a new enhancement—the Supervisor.

The Supervisor is a process that oversees the operation of the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its primary responsibilities include:

• Starting and stopping the collector.
• Communicating with the OpAMP server on behalf of the collector.
• Managing the collector’s configuration based on OpAMP messages.
• Automatically restarting the collector in case of crashes.

BDOT 2.0 is a big release that solidifies the foundation for the next phase of Bindplane.

2. Connector Support

We’ve integrated one of the newest OpenTelemetry Collector components in Bindplane: Connectors.

What is a Connector?

As a quick refresher, connectors act as a bridge between telemetry pipelines, enabling the creation of complex signals like log-based metrics (data reduction) and facilitating advanced processing and routing use cases.

Dan Jaglowski, a Principal Engineer and OTel Maintainer at Bindplane, helped co-develop the Connector framework and gave an in-depth talk at KubeCon EU ‘23.

The Routing Connector

In this release, we focused our attention on the Routing Connector first, as it provides users with a more streamlined and performant method to route their data, setting the stage for our next feature.

3. Data Routing v2

Over the past year, we’ve gathered feedback about the data routing experience in Bindplane, as it’s one of the key elements of a complete telemetry pipeline.

With Data Routing v2, users can upgrade their Collector configurations and access a new stacked configuration view with streamlined controls--upgrading their pipelines on the fly.

Data Routing v2 provides a few key benefits:

1. Improved performance: lessening the performance impact on the collector
2. Improved control: making it easier to alter your routes on the fly
3. Streamlined view: making it easier to glean the details of your configuration across each signal type: metrics, logs, and traces
   

4. Collector Gateways on Topology

Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector as a gateway is powerful, as it facilitates secured and scaled telemetry, SIEM, and observability deployments. Knowing this, we’ve simplified the implementation and given them greater visibility on Bindplane’s Overview page.

Previously, the Overview Page displayed source nodes on the left and their connections to destinations on the right. Now, when active data flows between a Gateway Destination and Source within the same project, Bindplane automatically generates an intermediate Gateway node. This feature simplifies tracing data paths from their source to their destination—even across multiple gateways—making complex telemetry configurations easier to monitor and optimize.

5. Processor Bundles

Processor bundles simplify Bindplane’s capabilities by grouping multiple processors into a single, reusable entity. While OpenTelemetry offers powerful tools, configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector often requires chaining processors, even for simple tasks like parsing JSON logs—a process that can become tedious.

This approach streamlines configuration by saving processors in the required order. For example, tasks like parsing JSON logs, severity, and timestamps can be combined into one efficient processor bundle.

Winter Release wrap-up: Just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, that’s a wrap on this announcement. All of the aforementioned features are available in BindPlane Cloud today, as well as beta releases of Data Routing v2 / BDOT 2.0. These will be coming to an on-prem release next week in version 1.85 of Bindplane.

There’s much more to come for Bindplane in 2025 in the realm of integrations, routing, scalability, and more. Want to hear more? Join our first community call on January 15, 2025, where we discuss new features in detail in our first live stream.

Happy New Year!