Launching ControlTheory and our new Observability Control Platform is a proud and happy moment for the founders and all the team that brought us to this point. That includes Silverton Partners who has led our $5 million seed round, which we have also announced today. ControlTheory is Austin-based, and we have worked with Silverton, an Austin-based VC firm, several times before and consider them a critical partner in building a scalable and successful business.
The ControlTheory vision focuses on Controllability, to help organizations regain control of their observability through cost control, operational control, and adaptive control. This is all happening at KubeCon Europe 2025 at Booth S732, April 1-4.
To explore the news and announcement, here are a few links that will help break down the details:
- Launch Press Release
- Observability Control Platform Overview
- The Control Theory Origin Story
- What is Controllability Blog
- Where to Learn More and Get a Demo
You can also learn about key use cases including how to:
Problem: Observability is Broken, Let’s Fix It
Observability has some issues – that’s not a news flash to all of you who are dealing with the rising costs of logs, metrics, and traces. It starts with the cost just to ingest your telemetry, next to index it, and then to retain it (even though it was your data in the first place). Custom metrics, which often represent your most powerful business KPIS can be a huge cost contributor if you leave cardinality unchecked. So where does that leave you? With surprise bills and overruns that result in valuable time spent tracing where the spikes came from and why – and then explaining that to management and finance.
Not to mention siloed data, exploding complexity, vendor lock-in, and annual renewal nightmares. To make matters worse, observability is not even delivering a return on that investment. Where’s the ROI when mean time to repair is still on the rise, root cause analysis continues to frustrate, and key business KPIs remain hidden?
Solution: Controllability + Observability
What if you could cut observability costs, sharpen operations, and better respond to change without replacing the observability you already have? Controllability is the answer. Controllability allows organizations to optimize their existing observability tools and platforms and solves 3 key observability challenges: (1) Cutting Observability Costs; (2) Maximizing Observability Outcomes, and (3) Adapting to Change – improving on simple 1-way, static telemetry pipelines that can optimize the full observability lifecycle through adaptive feedback loops, from code to cloud, platform engineering to SREs, development to operations.
The ControlTheory platform controls your telemetry in-flight with powerful cost, operational, and adaptive control to:
- Detect and manage log volume spikes and custom metric cardinality
- De-duplicate, filter, tail-sample, and enrich logs and traces
- Route & store telemetry in cold storage, rehydrating when needed
- Mask & redact logs for compliance
- Tracks offending developer deploys and commits
- Avoid vendor lock-in with an OpenTelemetry powered solution
The Future of Observability is in Your Hands
Observability has come a long way in the last 13 years, but innovation has been replaced with consolidation and stagnation. Observability now is in a transition phase, led by the disruption that OpenTelemetry brings to its core instrumentation and collection foundation. Controllability unlocks control and redistributes analytics and intelligence across the telemetry control plane. Observability analytics can then focus less on ingesting, indexing, retaining, and charging you for all the data and begin to solve the critical problems businesses are looking for today – faster MTTR, better incident management and root cause analysis, accelerated adoption of new AI technologies, and the ability to manage and intelligently respond to change. Controllability is here. Let’s move forward.
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