About Orb

About ORB

Project Orb: High-Level Description and Positioning

Product Name: Orb

1 Sentence Description: Unleash the power of dynamic edge observability

Longer 1 sentence description: Orb is an observability platform that helps operators, developers, and end-users understand their networks, distributed applications, and traffic flows in real-time.

Short Description:

Orb is a new kind of observability platform, fully open source and backed by NS1. Orb orchestrates network observability policies across a fleet of agents on the edge in real-time, allowing you to dynamically filter and collect precise “small data” from your global network, providing you with lightweight, immediately actionable results you can make sense of.

Orb gives you a precision instrument to collect just the observability data you are interested in, extracting the needles from the haystack at the edge.

Long Description:

What Orb Solves for

Orb is an observability platform that helps operators, developers, and end-users understand their networks, distributed applications, and traffic flows.

It combines concepts from the Internet of Things (IoT), Edge Compute, and high throughput stream processing to offer command of a fleet of distributed agents which can be orchestrated in real-time to summarize high volume, information-dense data streams down to lightweight, actionable data sets directly at the edge.

The fleet can be easily organized, managed, and reprogrammed in real-time to allow for a dynamic exploration of layered datasets based on filtering, analysis, and collection of a range of data provided by the modular input and analysis systems.

The platform is open-source, extensible, vendor-neutral, and cloud-native.

Why You Should Try Orb

Focuses on edge analysis, preferring “small data” style actionable metrics over collection and storage of terabytes of raw, inscrutable data: think of it as a scalpel rather than a machete
Powerful control plane to adjust analysis and collection parameters in real time across the entire fleet
Designed to plug in to popular observability stacks like Prometheus and Elasticsearch, plus cloud storage and data pipelines
Visualize and automate on results both at the edge (for hyper-real time local view) or centrally in the cloud (for global view)
Fast, reliable, secure, modular, extensible, open source

How Orb Works

Orb is composed of a side-car style agent (the open source pktvisor) that performs edge analysis on network data streams, combined with an IoT-inspired central control plane and UI that provide fleet and configuration management functionality.

pktvisor
- Resource efficient agent that analyses data streams in real-time
- Dynamic administration and configuration
- Modular system of inputs and analysers
- Open source project backed by NS1
Orb Control Plane and UI
- Cloud native, microservices-based architecture
- Self-host (docker-compose or k8s) or SaaS option
- Manages fleet of pktvisor agents, including heartbeats, tagging and grouping
- Orchestrates data set policies to decide what data to extract from which agents
- Central collection and exporting of summarized results that are then available for analytics, security, automation, etc
- Provides a single pane of glass across all sensors
- Provides a deep dive into visualizations and analytics that can help you make more effective network decisions in the future