Our main use cases for Cribl are Cribl Search, which allows us to search for logs and metrics for our cloud engineering data.

Cribl.Cloud Suite
CriblExternal reviews
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Enables teams to run scheduled log searches while maintaining data privacy for compliance
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The features of Cribl that I appreciate the most are the ability for in-place searching for our logs, so we don't have to move our logs outside of our cloud, which gives us privacy and compliance requirements.
Other features that we appreciate are dashboarding, alerting, and the ability to save searches so we can rerun them again on a scheduled basis. These features benefit our company in a variety of ways; mostly, our operations team can rerun their searches on a daily basis without having to rewrite the queries, and the ability to keep the data privately in our buckets is a huge requirement for us.
Cribl's ability to contain data cost and complexity is good. The complexity is very minimal. The reason for that is that the data does not move from where it lives. So there is no cost and there is no complexity in terms of moving the data and processing the data out of where it lives currently. Everything is in place, which is huge, and it makes everything so simple.
Cribl is great at handling a variety of volume logs as it is scalable and it uses scalable infrastructure behind the scenes, which allows us to constantly add more logs and it is able to handle it nicely.
Cribl search affected our data exploration practices overall. Cribl search has affected us greatly, and it has optimized our operations teams' time and efficiency. They're able to troubleshoot and find issues for our customers in a minimal amount of time. It also allows us to go back and look, for example, three months back for specific issues. With other tools, it was taking us a lot longer.
The UI is very intuitive in the sense that it gives you the chance to write your own query and customize it. And then once you figure that out, you're able to save it and rerun it on a scheduled basis so you don't have to reconfigure the query every single time.
What needs improvement?
Cribl can be improved in some ways; one of which is the ability to search multiple regions. Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Cribl for a little over a year now, and we use specifically Cribl Search.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have not experienced any downtime or crashes with Cribl; however, we have experienced some delays with some of the Cribl Search queries when the volume of data is humongous. In some parts, due to how the data is partitioned in our cloud, we were aware of those situations. Even though we did experience them, we anticipated those delays, so that was expected.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The process of expanding usage is very smooth, and Cribl Search is very scalable since it does the searches in place where the data grows, and the infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and it just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
How are customer service and support?
I would evaluate the customer service and technical support of Cribl as superb; honestly. Every time we had an issue, we created and opened a new ticket for Cribl support, and they were very responsive. Usually, within an hour, we get a response, and we are able to work with them back and forth until we resolve the issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to Cribl, we were able to use cloud-native specific solutions which were costly and time-consuming to pinpoint and figure out problems that can happen within a time window. It was not an easy user interface, and operations complained. Because of that, we started looking into other solutions, and that's how we stumbled upon Cribl.
What was our ROI?
The biggest return on investment when using Cribl is our time minimization for our operations team. They're able to look for customer issues real quickly, as opposed to the previous tools that we had, which were more time-consuming and also more costly. The time saved using Cribl is hours per engineer - about three hours' worth.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I did not deal with pricing directly. We had a team that dealt with Cribl.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We have looked into other solutions without naming names, and we considered major tools that are in the industry that are cloud-specific, cloud-native. What stood out was that Cribl is more cost-effective, and also, the main issue for us was we wanted to keep the data in our cloud.
We don't want to migrate it due to privacy concerns and compliance requirements. Cribl was about the only tool that actually was able to satisfy our requirements, which is mostly the reason why we chose Cribl.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise someone considering Cribl to really look into Cribl products, such as we did for Cribl Search, and really examine the challenges of huge volumes of logs, as Cribl has a really nice suite of products that would satisfy these requirements. Additionally, consider the requirements of data privacy, as the data does not get moved out of your cloud.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Has significantly reduced operational noise and simplified data routing for better log management
What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Cribl is to help us reduce cost. Currently, we use the Stream and Edge products of Cribl, and it's on-premise for us. The Stream helps us with any optimization work that we have to do in terms of reduction of the data itself.
What is most valuable?
The Stream product benefits us by giving us the ability to reduce and streamline the logs flowing into our SIEM. Cribl Stream helps us optimize the data before it reaches our SIEM tools. We've performed extensive aggregation and deduplication of logs, allowing us to cut down unnecessary data before it's sent downstream. This has helped us reduce costs by controlling exactly what data gets forwarded to the SIEM.
In our case, we deal with very chatty logs, especially firewall and other network logs. Using Cribl’s aggregation and drop functions, we were able to significantly reduce the noise. We send a full copy of the raw data to S3 or another data lake, while only the reduced logs are sent to the SIEM.
Another major value we gained from Cribl was how quickly and efficiently our data pipeline became. Previously, onboarding new sources or clients was a challenge. Now, the process is semi-automated and far more streamlined compared to what we had before.
What needs improvement?
One area that could be improved is the aggregation functionality within Cribl. It's very difficult to aggregate low-volume logs because the worker processes don't share state. Since each worker process initiates separately, it becomes very challenging for aggregation to maintain a consistent state across them. As a result, aggregation becomes problematic, with different worker processes operating in different states while pulling data. A good improvement to the aggregation functionality would be if most of these events could somehow land in a central processing unit or repository, where aggregation could be applied before the data is sent downstream.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Cribl for over three years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I can confidently say we’re finally getting some good sleep. Before Cribl, we were constantly getting late-night calls about data flow interruptions. Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of scale, Cribl scales very efficiently because we do horizontal scaling. If we have a burst in data sources or an increase in data sources, all we have to do is add a new worker nodes, and usually that solves the problem.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and the technical support team at Cribl has been very helpful to us. We've had some really unique cases where sometimes they would refer us to professional services, but they would come back with solutions from someone who may have run into that similar issue and provide us with a solution without having to go through professional services. This has been very helpful.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to Cribl, we were using SC4S, which had a syslog-ng engine, and we were doing a lot of manual work, especially when we had new data sources. We had to build something that didn't have a pre-built template within SC4S; it was a challenge to build out templates for it, especially with new folks joining the team sometimes who didn't have any clue about where these things were being kept. It was a huge challenge for us to build those templates for data sources that didn't have any templates at all.
We also had our heavy forwarders, which we were writing transformations and props to help us reduce data. It wasn't doing quite a very good job, and Cribl had some of these advanced functionalities such as aggregation and those drop functions, which was very easy to configure, whereas in the past with the heavy forwarders, it was very hard sometimes to even build transformations to do the same thing.
What about the implementation team?
When deploying Cribl, the process went very smooth because we had a Cribl engineer on our side who helped us significantly.
What was our ROI?
In terms of pricing, we had a very good deal with Cribl. We were paying very expensive SIEM costs, and introducing Cribl into the picture was able to bring down that cost. We were able to get the setup for the whole Cribl infrastructure at little to no cost, and it definitely brought us significant value and cost savings from that direction. In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Other products that we considered throughout the process included Splunk Ingest Processor, and we did a POC on that as well. Some of the positive aspects about the Ingest Processor was that it was right at the edge of your Splunk deployment and therefore there isn't any need to deploy or reshift your infrastructure; it actually goes right into it and then feeds into your Splunk environment. In terms of the disadvantages of Splunk Ingest Processor, it has very limited functionalities compared to what we were getting from Cribl. Cribl gives us the aggregation functionality, which was a huge win for us, being able to aggregate all the events brought us huge reductions, and also the drop functionality and some really advanced functionality within the Cribl tool itself.
What other advice do I have?
Based on my experience, the advice I would give to other companies considering Cribl is that your decision should be very specific to your use case but do not underestimate the amount of data you're dealing with. Data will continue to grow over time, and a tool like Cribl can significantly help reduce costs before the data is sent downstream.
Another important consideration is whether you need to send data to multiple destinations. This was a challenge for us previously, and Cribl helped simplify that process. My advice to companies is: if you're drowning in data and cost, Cribl is essential. It gives you full control over your data and makes management much easier.
As an organization, we've adopted AI heavily and integrated it into many of the tools we use today. We're actively looking to bring similar capabilities into Cribl. It's already in our pipeline, and we see strong potential in using AI to streamline how we build Packs and Pipelines. With AI integrated, we believe it could significantly reduce the time admins spend building specific pipelines for various data sources.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cribl a solid nine based on what we use it for today and the value it delivers.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Reduces ingest costs and improves data relevance in security operations
What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Cribl was primarily data reduction, as we were spending a lot of money on data ingest, and we brought Cribl on board to reduce the amount of money we were spending on that ingest.
Reduction in firewall logs was our primary use case for Cribl, as 80% of our data is Palo Alto firewall logs, and a lot of it we don't necessarily need in the SIEM tool, so we use Cribl to reduce that, keep only the stuff we want, drop the rest, and keep it out of the SIEM tool. The reduction in firewall logs keeps the unwanted data out so that when the security engineers are inside the SIEM tool, they only see the stuff they need to see.
What is most valuable?
The features of Cribl that I appreciate the most are the vendor agnosticism and the ability to send data almost anywhere you want, regardless of the data type, the format, or the destination; it's very flexible, and we've been able to integrate it with the tools that we have used in the past and are planning to use in the future.
The UI is very clean and super intuitive, making it very easy to bring data on via the sources, route the data to any number of destinations that you want, and create pipelines to transform and morph that data however you want.
Cribl is great in the sense that it can handle a large amount of volume and scales with the amount of data that you want to bring on board; if you need to bring on board more data, you just increase the amount of workers that you have.
We use Cribl to reduce data cost and complexity by both dropping fields that we don't want or parts of events that we don't want while keeping the things we do want, while also keeping all of the data, the event in its full form. We're a government agency, so we ned to keep everything. With Cribl, we can have our cake and eat it too, in a sense.
What needs improvement?
I'm an engineer, so I think about logging. Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Cribl for around four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would give Cribl a great rating on stability and reliability, especially if you use the built-in alerting engine that they have, as you can get alerts directly if there are any problems with the worker itself or worker processes, and the built-in monitoring page makes it super easy to monitor the health of all your worker processes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Cribl scales great with our company as we're actually bringing on a lot more data with all the AI tools rolling out, which generate a lot of logs, and Cribl scales horizontally by just adding more workers and worker processes, allowing us to tackle that data smoothly, quickly, and efficiently.
How are customer service and support?
We've had a great experience with Cribl customer service, as we have dedicated PS resources that have been super helpful when we were rolling out Cribl initially, migrating sources of data from syslog over to Cribl, routing, and parsing, with the support being A+ on both the PS side and the technical support side.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Cribl is really the only tool out there that does what it does, especially when looking at Splunk, as when Cribl first came out, Splunk wasn't able to intuitively do a lot of the things that Cribl did just out of the box with a GUI, making it super easy.
We were dabbling in data reduction, transformation using Splunk's Universal Forwarder and even the Heavy Forwarder in some instances, but it was just not as intuitive, with a lot of command line interaction and no GUI on the front end, making it harder to do, while Cribl makes it super easy.
How was the initial setup?
When we deployed Cribl, we were on-prem. All of our workers are on-prem. Our leaders are on-prem. Nothing's in the cloud. The major challenges that we faced really were related to the load balancer that needs to sit in front of the workers. I would like to maybe see that rolled up into Cribl in the future. That posed a lot of challenges for us just coordinating with our infrastructure team, getting the F5 engineers involved, using F5 load balancer. That was a challenge for us. We ultimately tackled it, however.
What was our ROI?
From my point of view, the biggest return on investment is just the downstream licensing costs we save on the SIEM side; we've reduced our data by a certain amount, and it has almost paid for Cribl itself and also allowed us to chop some licensing off of the SIEM side. We've reduced our amount of ingest by about 40% overall.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not really involved in the pricing and payment aspect of Cribl. I'm just the guy who implements it all once it's bought and paid for.
What other advice do I have?
We're not using Cribl Search at the moment; we're only using Stream and Edge.
If you're a company out there considering Cribl, I would highly recommend at least giving it due diligence; get linked up with the sales rep, as they're going to explain everything to you, and the sales engineers are great and very knowledgeable, making it worth your time and money, so you're going to be glad you did.
I rate Cribl nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Simplifies data processing and reduces ingest costs through real-time transformation
What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Cribl is primarily taking data from all of our different data sources, doing some processing, field extractions, normalizing the data, and then sending it along to our SIM for security incident response and investigation.
What is most valuable?
My favorite feature of Cribl is just how easy it makes working with the data; it's always been a pain point for us with other solutions, just taking our raw data from the source, transforming and manipulating it into what we need on the SIM side. That's always been a pretty heavy lift, however, Cribl has made that much easier.
The tools built into the platform allow us to work with the data, see the results in real-time, see what the output's going to look before we commit it, and has really made our job in that respect a lot easier.
The Cribl UI is very simple and easy to use, particularly when working with data from various sources; it makes it very easy to create pipelines, add complex logic to those pipelines, and then gives you a preview of what your data looks like before applying that pipeline and what you get after.
As we're bringing data in and Cribl's processing it, it makes it very easy to identify subsets of data or certain events that source data that maybe are less useful or just noisy, not really applicable to to what we need what our security team needs, and we're able to just drop those events before they get sent out and and ingested by our SIEM. So that helps keep our data pipeline streamlined, keeps our output clean. It filters out noise, and then it makes our analysis more efficient. That reduces the data volume going into our SIMs, and that reduces and limits the ingest costs associated with that end. With less data, there's less to process when you're running complex searches. So we have charges against those compute resources reduced.
What needs improvement?
There are opportunities for AI to be incorporated more tightly into Cribl to help build out those pipelines and apply some more complex logic to those transformations could be useful.
Optimizing CPU utilization on the edge side is something that could be improved; we see, particularly on older hardware and older OSes, Cribl Edge service can eat up quite a bit of CPU resources compared to some other products we've used in the past, indicating there's room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using Cribl for about one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have run into a few performance issues and system crashes, mainly due to administrator error; building inefficient pipelines ended up utilizing or over-consuming CPU resources on the worker server, causing some outages. We've worked with Cribl support to resolve those issues, and it's been pretty stable recently.
As we've only been using Cribl for about a year now, I view many of those issues as part of learning the product and becoming better stewards of the system.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We've only been using Cribl for about a year, so we haven't really seen much expansion and are still in a holding pattern. However, leveraging cloud resources does provide the ability to scale; we can provision additional servers on-prem to handle more data load as we scale up and bring on more resources, so I'm confident we'll be able to meet our future demands.
How are customer service and support?
When we've had issues with Cribl, the support we've received has been fantastic; they've been very responsive.
Our account team has stayed on top of the issues we've submitted, and all of the technicians we've worked with have been very knowledgeable, so we've been very happy with Cribl support overall.
On a scale of one to ten, I would give customer service a nine; I'm hesitant to say ten out of principle. There's always room for improvement.
The technicians we've been paired with on the cases we've submitted have all been knowledgeable and responsive. Our account team has been great, and when we've raised questions or concerns, they're quick to provide assistance.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Our primary driver behind implementing Cribl was the need to normalize our data with our existing SIM solution at the time; we had numerous problems making it easily searchable and analyzable. With our previous solution, we easily onboard new data sources, however, as we did that, we weren't necessarily taking the time to properly extract the fields out of that data that we needed.
Consequently, we ended up with a lot of data that was either not helpful or just not usable at all, which just consumed costs and space. Cribl addresses this by allowing us to easily create those pipelines and manipulate the data so that we could reduce the amount of information that we're ingesting that was not useful.
How was the initial setup?
Overall, the deployment of Cribl was very easy. We did not really run into too many challenges at all.
We deployed a hybrid architecture, so we primarily leverage the Cribl cloud. We also have some on-premises workers who we have connected to the cloud. It's a cloud-connected, yet independent leader and has worker nodes for processing edge data from offline edge nodes. So those systems are in secure VLANs and don't have outbound internet access. We're able to stand up an on-premises infrastructure that is still cloud-connected, that's part of our overall environment, and can capture that data and send it along to our system. So overall, we really did not have any challenges standing up the infrastructure. It's been very easy to stand up and maintain.
What was our ROI?
The return on investment for Cribl is that we've seen it really pay for itself.
When we recently went through a SIM migration from Splunk to Microsoft Sentinel, we incorporated Cribl to help us reduce our ingest costs. What we've seen is really an overall reduction of just shy of 40% in our ingest into our SIM platform versus prior to having Cribl, and those ingest costs have basically canceled out the pricing of Cribl licensing for us based on the volume of data that we have.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I don't recall considering other similar solutions to Cribl. Cribl was the frontrunner on that one. We did a proof of concept early on and immediately saw how easy it was to work with the data and recognized the value it could bring, leading us to move forward with it.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise other companies considering Cribl to just do it; it's worth it, as there's really little to no downside. It just makes your life easier.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cribl a nine, as it brings tremendous value.
As a small security team, it really empowers us to get more useful data out of our sources, making our SOC and incident response teams more efficient and improving the overall security posture of our organization as we now have accurate, usable, easily analyzed data.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Management of thousands of agents is simpler while reducing data volume significantly
What is our primary use case?
Security data is my main use case for Cribl. I ingest data using Cribl Edge and then process the data using Cribl Stream to reduce the amount of volume of the data collected for use in other platforms.
How has it helped my organization?
The Cribl Edge features that are easier to use or to manage help me to reduce the amount of people I need to help manage the product.
As part of Stream, reducing the amount of volume provides a financial benefit to allow us to pay less for the other products that we are using the data in down the data path or stream.
What is most valuable?
The ease of management and configuration of Cribl Edge features is highly beneficial. I have many thousands of Cribl Edge nodes deployed, and it's very easy to make configuration changes across the board or update the agent.
It can contain data cost and complexity. In terms of data complexity and cost, Cribl does a good job at providing solutions that will compress the data while retaining its usable form, or split the data in such that you can retain its original form and send a reduced form to your end destination. In terms of reducing the amount of logs with Cribl for firewall specifically, I am able to reduce the size and reformat the logs so that they are better able to be used downstream.
Cribl has influenced the data processing workflow by allowing us to be platform-agnostic, and being able to separate the data into different destinations is quite easy.
The Cribl UI in general is very intuitive in how to manage log processing and configurations. Customer service and support deserves an 8.5 rating. They are really good at what they do, and you can tell that they are passionate about their product and helping customers have success.
What needs improvement?
Cribl could be improved by some UI tweaks and some usability tweaks, mostly centered around error troubleshooting for large volumes of Edge nodes.
I have talked to the developers of the Cribl Edge software and they're very open and welcoming to the feedback and are looking to implement changes to help make the product better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cribl for a few months since July of 2025.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cribl is overall a very reliable product and solution. The few times that I've had any reliability issues, they were quick to help me identify and proactive in helping me identify potential issues in the platform.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have over 10,000 employees.
Cribl does a good job of handling large volumes of data very quickly. The Cribl Cloud that we have deployed allows for easy scaling to meet the needs of onboarding tens of thousands of Cribl Edge devices in a single day in some cases. Cribl makes scaling for Edge or Cribl Cloud data nodes very easy to add or replace Cribl worker nodes and allows you to, with one click, reconfigure Cribl Cloud workers to be able to ingest higher volumes of data.
How are customer service and support?
Cribl technical support and customer service has been great so far. I really appreciate having a direct line to my Cribl SE or many different Cribl private resources via their Slack channel.
It is a really easy way to quickly get an answer on something rather than having to put in a support ticket, however, support tickets are also fairly straightforward and easy to use.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not use other solutions before Cribl that do the same thing as Cribl does.
How was the initial setup?
My experience for deploying Cribl was pretty easy. We have Cribl Cloud, and they make that a very simple solution to stand up. And for the on-prem resources that we have for Cribl workers, those were also easy to stand up and get connected to the cloud. So, overall, it's very easy to deploy the platform and to get it to configure.
What was our ROI?
The biggest return on investment is probably the log reduction capabilities while retaining the essential information from the logs. In some cases, greater than 80% reduction is achievable. Across thousands of endpoints, it really adds up quickly.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing for Cribl was fairly straightforward. They have a universal license that allows us to consume the portions of Cribl that we want to use or flex into other portions of Cribl. We primarily use Cribl Edge and Cribl Stream at this point, but we could also use the same license for Cribl Lake or Cribl Search.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I did not consider other solutions in my company before choosing Cribl.
What other advice do I have?
I've worked in information security for over ten years.
With any SaaS solution, it's sometimes a difficult decision to decide to do on-premises versus a SaaS solution for on-cloud. I would recommend Cribl on Cloud for its ease of use and manageability. The managed updates are very nice and they have a proactive services team that helps monitor the infrastructure.
Overall, I would rate Cribl nine out of ten. While there are some shortcomings, the direct feedback loop they give to customers makes it a really good product overall.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Has streamlined data routing across repositories and enabled flexible pipeline maintenance
What is our primary use case?
My current use cases involve using it as a pipeline to process data, to route data from cloud logs to different repositories. Some data goes to Splunk and others go to different data lakes. I didn't work with the firewall logs directly. We use Cribl to process web activity and route data that we wanted to into Splunk ES to create detections.
What is most valuable?
What I appreciate the most about Cribl is the free training, the free access to all the training, and how easy it is to learn it. Cribl is great in handling high volumes of diverse data types, such as logs and metrics. It does the job.
What needs improvement?
The product is very good. They could add more AI-assisted pipeline development in the future release.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cribl for six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I haven't seen any lagging or crashing with Cribl.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Cribl's scalability is very good.
How are customer service and support?
I have never contacted the technical support or customer support of Cribl.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment when I first started with Cribl was fairly easy, very easy.
What about the implementation team?
We were a team for this job.
What other advice do I have?
I have used alternatives to Cribl. I forgot the name, but it's a CrowdStrike product they just acquired that is the closest one I've used to Cribl in terms of the quality and the features. Currently, I prefer Cribl more than CrowdStrike. I still haven't played much with the other one, but I didn't find any issues with Cribl.
Regarding Cribl's ability to contain data cost and complexity, if they can reduce their cost, that will make them more competitive. However, I don't know what else they can do in regards to how the application works. It's very good.
For the project that I was involved in, it took me probably three weeks to set it up. We had to maintain our pipelines, not because of anything related to Cribl itself, but because the data source changed, so we had to adjust our pipelines. That was the kind of maintenance that we did.
I would rate Cribl a nine out of ten.
Helps reduce log ingestion cost by dropping unnecessary events and customizing pipelines
What is our primary use case?
Our use case for Cribl is actually a data pipeline where we collect logs from the source and we stream it through Cribl and then to a destination. The destination is mainly the SIEM tools such as CrowdStrike or SecOps. We collect the logs from various sources, and even the Windows logs are streamed through Cribl worker nodes and data lakes. For example, if it is AWS, from the S3 bucket we stream to Cribl and then send it to Google SecOps, which is the primary SIEM we are using.
What is most valuable?
The best feature in Cribl, when getting logs from some custom application, is the ability to break up logs that pile up together and come as one event.
Cribl has a feature called JSON Unroll or Unroll function that allows you to differentiate the events; each event will come ingested as a single log instead of piling it up with multiple events. This is critical as this generally happens in CrowdStrike. This feature helps us significantly.
When the ingestion is high from unwanted logs, logs not related to security purposes can be dropped by writing the parser function. By dropping events that are not required for security purpose monitoring, we can reduce the ingestion, which drastically reduces the cost as well. Cribl gives another option where I can store some logs, and when needed, I can pick them up from there.
The interface is very handy and not very complicated, yet there are many functions you can perform. You can play around with numerous functions, parse there, and add UDMs to SecOps, which makes it really easy.
To simplify the pipeline, when we go to the pipelines, there are vast options. We can make it specific requirements based on the customers. I would prefer a customized or simplified version. Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide.
What needs improvement?
Cribl is a stable product, however, there are areas for improvement. Their documentation should be updated.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cribl for a year and a half.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cribl is a stable product, but there are areas for improvement. Since Cribl is on-premises, server maintenance is required, and we have an IT team specifically to look into that. We are not worried about that.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There is a similar platform by Google called BindPlane, which is not capable of handling high volumes of data as the data gets stuck in the pipeline, causing ingestion delays.
However, Cribl does not present that problem. Since I have worked with both data pipeline tools, I can compare and say that Cribl is more mature than others.
How are customer service and support?
I have not reached out to Cribl support. That said, my colleagues have.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I'm using another product called BindPlane, which does almost the same things; however, Cribl is a very mature product with many functions. You can use the Eval function, Unroll function, break events, add any particular field you want, or parse in Cribl before sending to a destination.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup involves dropping some events that are not required for security purpose monitoring. This is based on suggestions from our SOC team or customers.
The deployment itself is a bit compicated and the documentation is not very clear.
What about the implementation team?
We are a partner with Cribl. We have CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike has partnered with Cribl; they even changed the name to CrowdStream.
What was our ROI?
It has saved my cost and our customers' cost drastically since I cannot drop the logs directly in SIEM. In Cribl, I can drop the logs, and when I'm not ingesting them, their licensing cost is drastically reduced.
What other advice do I have?
Cribl Search is quite handy; you can use regex where there's a function that contains, and you can search for a specific keyword, which shows everything that matches that keyword. After playing around a couple of times, it becomes easy. At first, it is complicated; you need to go to worker groups, select the data lake, select the worker node. Once you get used to it, it's quite handy. I would definitely recommend Cribl to other users.
Based on my experience, I would rate Cribl eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Runs smoothly and stands out with its well-organized user interface
What is our primary use case?
Our use case for Cribl is that we want to make sure that we parse everything correctly, and it is easier for us to transfer our data in our system in a more compact way; it runs smoothly.
How has it helped my organization?
We're in the beginning stage of using Cribl, but the reduction in firewall logs will help significantly with processing speed. We just worked on handling high volumes of diverse data including logs, metrics, and files last week, and it ran very smoothly with quick processing.
What is most valuable?
The best feature about Cribl is how easy it is to move; the UI is very simple, everything is very neat, and everything is organized. We have been dealing with Cribl extensively recently.
What needs improvement?
Cribl is awesome. The university offers a lot of great resources, but there could be more detailed information about Cribl itself. It would be helpful to have a step-by-step guide that covers everything from the basics. Since Cribl is such a large platform with numerous features, having a clear, structured approach would make it easier for me and others to understand and utilize its capabilities.
I believe it would be beneficial to have a step-by-step guide for users on our endpoint. This would make it easier for them to understand how to use it. When I explored the endpoint, I found myself wishing for clearer instructions presented in a sequential manner. This is just a small critique based on my experience using it so far.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using Cribl around three months ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate stability as a nine; nothing is perfect, but it's great.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would definitely give scalability a nine as in terms of what we're seeing and thinking about, it's solid.
We have around eight or nine users. Everyone is touching base with it. For now, it will stay at eight unless we expand. We are going through an expansion, so it’s possible we might increase the number of users; but for now, we’re steady at our current count. We are a medium-sized business.
How are customer service and support?
Their customer support is fantastic.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using a manual solution previously; this transition to Cribl is our first time implementing an automated solution.
How was the initial setup?
We are typically on-premises. I believe Cribl is currently focused more on the OT side because the primary customer base is more enterprise-oriented. OT relies heavily on this. However, if I'm not mistaken, we operate in an on-premises or hybrid environment; we are definitely not using the cloud.
We are still in the process of deployment, and so far, the deployment has been going fairly well and has been relatively quick for us.
We are in the transitioning stage; we're implementing everything from square one with our team, participating in daily calls to make that happen. We are experiencing some issues with data transfer and parsing errors, which is extending our SIEM transfer time.
What was our ROI?
Based on what our managers say, we have saved a significant amount of time and resources moving from a manual approach to something that's more automated.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
As I visited different booths at the conference, I realized that I still prefer Cribl. Even though I haven't worked with any other platforms, I was impressed by how everything is laid out and how simple it feels to work with your system. I genuinely appreciate the user interface. I find it straightforward and well-organized, making it easy to navigate.
I also noticed that they have implemented something like a password manager, which sounded familiar. Overall, everything I saw reaffirmed my preference for Cribl. So, despite checking out various booths, I'm still committed to Cribl at the end of the day.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend it. The user interface is great, and the customer support has been fantastic as well. Our experience with Cribl has been very smooth; everything runs seamlessly. There are no delays or sluggishness, which I really appreciate. I have to give it props for that; everything operates very smoothly.
I would rate Cribl a nine out of ten.
Enables seamless SIEM/Data Migration and Log Filtration across the enterprise estate
What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Cribl was SIEM migration, where we merged multiple SIEM solutions to a single SIEM solution. SIEM migration was the most major use case we were looking for. The second use case was a manageable logging solution which could have a nice interface and would be easy to manage. Data cutoff or Log Filtering was the third biggest use case we were looking for, where we were seeking data reduction to define what we need and don't need. Additionally, we performed data masking for PII i.e. payments and medical data. These were the main use cases that were all provided by Cribl.
How has it helped my organization?
My previous company did a significant amount of business using Cribl, particularly in servicing customers who had a perfect fit for the solution. From a consultant's perspective, I can say that we resold licenses for Cribl, delivered services related to Cribl, and also provided maintenance services. This brought a decent amount of business to our company.
Regarding the reduction in firewall logs due to Cribl, it did influence our overall data processing and workflow. For example, the AWS VPC flow logs were greatly reduced in size, which had a substantial impact on the licensing costs for destination platforms. It did help us and the customer quite a bit. Cribl's role in its reduction of firewall logs, either cloud or on-prem, was vital.
The data cost is an important aspect. Cribl is specifically designed to reduce the data costs associated with the destination platform. This is one of its core offerings.
Regarding platform usability, the Cribl interface is quite intuitive and easy to use. The navigation and seperate sections are easily accessible, making it very user-friendly. The color scheme and palette are excellent, and there’s nothing messy or unmanaged about the user interface. Overall, I personally find the user interface to be very comforting.
What is most valuable?
The features of Cribl I have found most valuable include its SIEM migration capability. It facilitates migration quite nicely. The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique. Data masking is an important one. And as Cribl Stream can be deployed on-prem, on cloud or as a hybrid model, its support for every sort of enterprise estate is highly appreciated.
The UI interface is very good. It's user-friendly, intuitive, not complicated, and sufficient. It's not more than what it needs to be, and it's simple without being overly complicated.
What needs improvement?
They've already done many good things with the product, but perhaps they could implement a temporary SIEM solution where we could store logs and display them as a SIEM, though I think that's not the space that Cribl is actually looking into. Based on my experience, this product is brilliant and there isn't much or anything important lacking in the product.
We encountered some occasional issues with the syslog data stream, particularly when handling large data volume, and getting it to parse and field extracted correctly, but no major alarms that would halt the days operation. There were few source vendor specific challenges, but overall, I didn't notice anything major beyond that. Most of the process went smoothly. However, we did need to carry some troubleshooting to resolve the issues we faced while connecting with other platforms and few data stream miss-behaving, which wasn't a straightforward task for us. In terms of large datasets—whether they originated from network inputs, virtual machines, or cloud instances—ingesting the data into the destination was relatively easy. In summary, aside from the usual difficulties or issues that someone could face with any project, everything else went well.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Cribl for more than four years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cribl is quite stable and doesn't crash; there's no unusual behavior. If it's stable, then it's reliable. I could see the data that goes in and how it is being processed at each stage. There are no concerns when Cribl is working in production environment.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Cribl is quite scalable, as we could add worker nodes as our data grows, so it's sufficiently scalable and able to facilitate as much data as there can be.
How are customer service and support?
Their technical support has been really great, and solution architects we worked with were really knowledgeable. They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate with everything we needed. The experience with Cribl technical staff has been one of the best.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
For similar use cases, different companies were using different tactical solutions i.e. custom scripting. None of the solutions were strategic and well thought through. Some were using scripting, some were not utilizing anything. Some were ingesting into the SIEM and then doing all the tasks which should be done pre-ingestion. There was a lot of disorganization, and Cribl had really found the gap where they could offer their services.
How was the initial setup?
I performed the entire setup of the Cribl infrastructure.
With the Cribl Stream setup, I first had to initiate the tenant. Once the tenant was provisioned, I configured IAM setup i.e SSO, RBAC etc. I onboarded the data sources and deployed the worker nodes to the appropriate locations. These locations could be various subnets, cloud virtual machines, on-premises virtual machines, or any ready-to-use Cribl cloud workers we needed. The process depended on the company's IT infrastructure. After the worker nodes were set up, it was simply a matter of onboarding the data stream into the platform and then directing it to the destination platforms.
As for Cribl's deployment, it operates in a hybrid environment, utilizing both cloud and on-premises solutions, tailored to meet the needs of different customers.
What about the implementation team?
I delivered Cribl services as a Certified Cribl Consultant to various customers. Cribl technical support was arranged whenever there was a need for it.
What was our ROI?
We have managed to save significant money and resources for multiple customers, reducing operational complexity and the cost of destination platforms but unfortunately I cannot quote specific numbers due to NDA.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent. Organizations looking to ingest terabytes or petabytes of data each day find it quite an inexpensive solution. The pricing model for Cribl Stream is one of the best values that customers would be getting, and I don't think any other solution offers this much value at this price point.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Confluent was considered, but Cribl emerged as the best solution.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Cribl an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Facilitates seamless log integration and reduces data costs with efficient compression
What is our primary use case?
I use Cribl with all of my customers that I manage services for. It's how I get their third-party log sources into Microsoft Sentinel.
How has it helped my organization?
We save about 75% percent of our costs by processing network and firewall logs through Cribl. This is largely due to the compression and duplication that exists within those logs. They tend to be very noisy, and most of the information isn’t useful from a security standpoint. While some of the data might be valuable to other departments, we don’t need to store all that extra information. By removing these unnecessary details, we quickly reduce our data retention costs by 75%.
Cribl makes it very easy to contain data cost and complexity. As far as complexity is concerned, there might be manual ways to do it in other products, but not with the ease and durability. It remains the same, whereas you might try to put a patchwork of other things together to get the same result. In terms of controlling costs, we achieve about 75% savings on data storage, which is fantastic. However, it’s worth noting that Cribl is not free, so we do pay for it to realize these savings. As long as Cribl doesn’t increase their prices too steeply or too quickly, we should be fine in terms of managing our costs.
Cribl definitely handles high volumes of diverse data types. Anything from firewall logs, endpoint security logs, to Windows event logs can become very noisy, especially in large environments. I've not had an issue with Cribl dropping logs. Occasionally there could be a short-term outage, but that's definitely very rare.
What is most valuable?
My favorite feature is Cribl Stream. That's probably the only Cribl product I have a lot of experience with, and Cribl Stream makes it very easy to identify where all the customer's log sources are and to quickly connect them to a destination source such as Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Azure Data Storage.
Cribl Stream does two things: not only does it make it easy to connect one log source or one dataset to multiple storage locations, but it also has compression features, which greatly reduce the storage cost for that data. It strips out and compresses data so that only the absolute information remains and not any duplicates. Dual destination and compression are the two top features.
What needs improvement?
I would Cribl to become more Microsoft-focused. A lot of my work is in the Microsoft environment. Cribl supports all of these other platforms out there, and they seem to be developing a lot for CrowdStrike. I'd prefer to see some Microsoft-specific connectors built inside of Cribl.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cribl for about two years now. They've only been around for about four years, so I've been using them for half of their existence.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The performance and stability of Cribl are fantastic. The uptime is 99.9%. We are realizing all of the cost savings promised, and there are no failures.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is easy because we can just go into the portal and add a new log source. If we onboard a new firewall or something we want to collect logs on, we can quickly implement that. I don't need to talk to a Cribl engineer to connect a new log source. The only requirement might be purchasing more Cribl credits if I'm running low because I'm asking it to do more than originally specified.
How are customer service and support?
We've engaged their customer service and support, and anytime there's an outage, they've been very receptive. They've quickly escalated our tickets and helped us get resolution. We've never felt we were waiting for a response or that they didn't know what was going on. I think it's maybe because we were an early customer. I would assume it's the same for all customers, but we've gotten great treatment.
I would give them a 10 out of 10 for support. They are very responsive. We deal with a lot of other cloud solution providers who have tried to save money on support. It could be that because Cribl is new and they really want to make sure all new customers are being successful, but we really hope this continues. We don't feel we're alone.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The only alternative I can compare Cribl to would be Azure Data Transformation, Azure Data Time configuration rules and policies, basically making the storage source sort the data, and that is very painful. I don't see any next-best options when it comes to Cribl. They seem to be a leader and standing alone in their service offering, specific to Cribl Stream. For other products such as Cribl Lake, there's now Microsoft Sentinel Lake, which is a competitor, and I haven't really analyzed the pricing to see how competitive that is. But regarding Cribl Stream, there's no close competitor. The closest is extremely painful, requiring about 20 pages of configuration to even get close.
How was the initial setup?
It's straightforward. They have a really nice user interface, and their service engineers will guide you through the initial setup. Since they are compensated based on product usage, they ensure that we are properly onboarded and that our experience is as successful as possible.
To deploy Cribl probably took an hour. Identifying all the different log sources that we wanted to bring in took about another eight hours of human work as it was a data exercise of determining which log sources are important to us, and where we can get the best compression or data size reduction. You can connect to them all automatically, but you want to have the thought process of which ones matter and what actual data you need.
It does not require any maintenance on my end. The big thing is just checking connector health to make sure everything is running and that logs aren't dropping and that there haven't been any changes. In case there's any outage, putting in a ticket for any outage issues is very minimal. It's set it and forget it, and then just monitor to make sure nothing's bad or nothing has gone wrong.
What about the implementation team?
We're a large organization, so we have a team of about five people who worked on the deployment of Cribl. I'm sure smaller organizations could use a lot less. We probably could have gotten away with two or three people. Not to say one person couldn't do it, but it's always good to have another person putting eyes on the process just so that we don't have a single point of failure.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing has been increasing year-over-year, and I understand that the cost of business continues to grow. The cost of log retention and all the aspects they're fighting against, they are also a victim of. It is a concern that I'm watching as they raise prices about 10% year-over-year. I am still observing significant cost savings, although the amount of savings is gradually decreasing. Additionally, they are currently the sole provider of this type of solution, which means they face no competitive threats.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Cribl a ten out of ten. I truly appreciate them as partners. They genuinely feel like they're with us on this journey to manage the increasing volume of data. It's been exciting to watch them grow. At first, I thought I was a bit of a nerd for being an early adopter, but seeing so many others come on board after us reassures me that we made the right decision.