Open Arsenal

See what your systems actually experience.

OperatorFirst is an open-source, self-hosted observability platform built for teams that want complete ownership of their monitoring infrastructure. Instead of relying on centralized third-party services, OperatorFirst allows organizations to deploy their own control plane and distributed probe network across cloud environments, on-prem systems, edge devices, and remote regions. Its core philosophy is simple: operators should see what their systems actually experience, using data they control and can verify.

One of OperatorFirst’s standout features is its distributed truth model. Rather than depending on a single monitoring node, checks can run simultaneously from multiple regions and networks. Results are compared using configurable consensus rules such as majority vote or quorum validation, reducing false positives and revealing how real users in different locations experience a service. This makes it especially useful for detecting routing problems, regional outages, CDN issues, and intermittent failures that traditional monitoring often misses.

Security and trust are built directly into the platform through cryptographic verification. Every probe result can be digitally signed, creating tamper-evident records of uptime, latency, and failures. Combined with append-only evidence logs and replayable incident history, OperatorFirst provides an auditable monitoring trail that can be used for compliance, SLA validation, or forensic investigations. Instead of simply trusting a dashboard, teams gain proof-backed operational visibility.

OperatorFirst also supports modern DevOps workflows through Monitoring as Code. Checks are defined in version-controlled YAML files, enabling GitOps-style deployments, peer review, rollbacks, and environment-specific configurations. A powerful plugin ecosystem based on WebAssembly (WASM) allows teams to extend the platform with custom checks for APIs, databases, queues, blockchain nodes, and proprietary protocols. Synthetic browser monitoring adds full user journey testing for logins, forms, dashboards, and checkout flows, complete with screenshots, network traces, and console logs.

For day-to-day operations, OperatorFirst includes real-time dashboards, alerting integrations, anomaly detection, blast radius visualization, and root cause correlation. It can connect metrics, logs, traces, DNS failures, TLS errors, and latency spikes into a clearer picture of what is happening during incidents. The result is a monitoring system that goes beyond basic uptime checks and becomes a full operator-owned observability layer—transparent, extensible, and designed to scale with modern infrastructure.