Cribl Reviews

A few use cases for Cribl include mainly reducing the amount of data that goes into our CM solution by reducing the data that flows through and only sending the important data into our CM solution.

With Cribl, I have seen a decrease in firewall logs as we send a lot of firewall logs into Cribl, aggregating and reducing the log size by aggregation or removing unwanted data, which works smoothly. Anything with logs—firewall, network logs, DNS logs—works fine.

Cribl does a great job at containing data costs, which is our major use case to reduce data costs for the CM solution, and we do that quite efficiently with Cribl by aggregating the data, masking unnecessary parts, and changing the structure into key-value pairs, thus reducing the cost significantly.

What I like about Cribl is that it is quite easy to use because everything is via UI, so there is no coding involved, making it more like a drag and drop functionality to add your items. It is an easy tool, easy to learn, and handy, allowing a lot more to be done without requiring extensive coding.

Cribl UI feels quite intuitive based on my experience after using Cribl for four years with my team and other vendors. It is easy to use, allowing many people to work at the same time, and versioning is already integrated. The same packs can be used with different machines and different workflows, which is also a good part. Cribl provides free education, unlike other tools, allowing us to learn the necessary skills and implement them in the actual production environment.

Cribl brings significant benefits like cost-effectiveness, reducing CM costs, and making our data vendor-agnostic since data flows through Cribl. If I decide to change my CM solution later, it will be an easy switch. Complex data can be simplified into easier formats like key-value pairs, making our current use cases streamlined.

I would like to see improvements in the metrics and traces, as Cribl is currently more geared towards logs, making it hard to get very long traces to view in the UI when they are quite big. I have not used metrics much because I am aware of the issues Cribl has with handling proper metrics, particularly with multi-metrics when there are multiple dimensions into a single metric. We use Cribl nearly 99.9% for logs only, not for metrics and traces, but I hope to see improvements in the future.

On the other hand, I would like to see improvements in pack management, which is currently a mess with no way to manage packs differently across worker groups. I also wish Cribl would introduce more functions, as sometimes we have to create more JavaScript functions ourselves. Aside from that, everything is going well, especially with recent AI integrations.

I have been working with Cribl for four years.

Cribl is pretty stable, with me experiencing only minor hiccups and no major alarms. Previous data loss issues have been resolved over the past two and a half years, making it a stable option.

I consider Cribl scalable as we are using the Kubernetes version, and I have seen that scaling is manageable. We have also checked on-prem and found similar results, confirming it to be a scalable solution.

Cribl technical support is generally good, albeit sometimes inconsistent. The U.S. team is excellent once a ticket is escalated, while the support in Germany or Europe could be improved. I would rate the technical support at a seven on a scale of one to ten.

Prior to Cribl, I had not used any different product of the same kind, which is an advantage for Cribl. While there are a few products emerging now, the last time I checked, they were not equivalent to Cribl.

Cribl initial setup was not complex because Cribl is very similar to another product we used for multiple years, allowing us to extend scripts easily. I would say installation is pretty straightforward, and the documentation and education provided by Cribl greatly aids the process.

Our deployment was primarily in-house, with initial assistance from Cribl engineers. We have managed it internally for the last three and a half years.

Regarding ROI, Cribl reduces our CM cost by about twenty to twenty-five percent due to the data that is flowing in and reducing the overall amount.

I did not evaluate any other options before choosing Cribl since there was hardly anything on the market like it at that time, although I see a couple of viable options now.

My advice for organizations considering Cribl is that it is a nice tool, very effective with limited competition, but you should plan thoroughly regarding your use case to avoid wasting licenses. It is essential to implement something significant, considering the infrastructure as well. I rate Cribl at an eight overall.

Our use case for Cribl is observability from an infrastructure point of view; we use Cribl for getting the logs from our infrastructure. The metrics or logs which we require from our servers or containers, or the platforms where we have deployed our product, necessitate real-time data processing, so Cribl helps us in that regard.

I love Cribl Edge feature, which is an agent we can directly deploy at our servers; that is quite a good feature that helps in collecting data locally at the server level. Additionally, the search is good; we can search across all our data sources, and it is quite fast. Cost efficiency also helps in optimizing costs.

Cribl handles high volumes of diverse data types very well. We have around 200 to 250 in-house servers, and we require observability and visibility over those servers. We don't have a team that manages them, and we cannot hire too many people to manage 200 servers. Cribl provides visibility and helps in that regard; we get real-time metrics, allowing us to see when we need to increase the compute of our servers or when we have over-provisioned resources. It helps in optimizing costs at our infrastructure level, and Cribl is quite cost-efficient, helping in that aspect as well.

We haven't gone very deep into it, so we don't have a heavy use case, but most probably, as it helps us in optimizing costs, that is the best thing about it. Cribl's UI is quite simple and minimal, helping the developer and team get familiar with it earlier; however, it provides functionalities in a very deep way. Thus, it becomes difficult if we don't require some metrics or something for filtering, as Cribl has provided many functionalities to filter out metrics which we don't require with our lighter use case. That has created some hindrance for us; otherwise, everything is quite good.

The function section is quite messy and includes too many functionalities which are generally not required at an amateur level. If we advance at that level, then definitely it is required to get the precise logs that filter out unnecessary data when the data stream is quite big. At that time, definitely it is required, but at the initial level, it becomes quite difficult to get the proper data that is required.

I used the solution about six months ago.

We haven't faced much regarding instability such as lagging or crashing; the backend team and support staff are quite nice, and we didn't encounter any significant issues with stability.

Scaling with Cribl is very easy, both horizontally and vertically, so we don't have any hindrance in scaling the tool.

My team has contacted technical support for some tasks they were facing issues with; they reported that the staff is quite nice, and the support is very good. However, we didn't require much support, only maybe twice or thrice.

We used to utilize Node Exporter, Grafana, and Prometheus.

Cribl sits in between those tools; it does not replace any of them. Node Exporter helps collect the host metrics, Prometheus is responsible for scraping the metrics, and Grafana serves as a dashboard. Cribl assists with infrastructure observability without replacing any of the tools. We use all of them right now as well.

Cribl's initial deployment is quite easy and nice; we didn't face any difficulties in doing that. Additionally, scaling it horizontally or vertically is very good.

I lead my team; I don't set and manage deployment myself anymore. Initially, when we had a very small team, I started building it, but now my team handles all this.

I'm not from the team that handles pricing; another department deals with that. However, the pricing appears to be good because I haven't been approached with concerns about why we are spending a particular amount. I think our pricing is fair.

For our use case, I would give Cribl a score of 10 out of 10, but overall, if I rated it for a large organization that requires it, it would be fair to give an eight. I would rate this review as an 8 overall.

I use Cribl to move data and help with moving data, connecting different data sources to different destinations, which is what I mainly use it for.

I also use it to help parse the data as well.

Something that I really appreciate about Cribl is the preview feature. Whether it would be on the JavaScript I'm working on, it shows me the output in real time, which really helps with development.

I also appreciate the preview feature when it comes to data pipelines, as it shows me in real time how my pipeline would be working with the data. Additionally, I really appreciate the live capture feature as well to get an idea of how the data looks at different stages in Cribl environment.

I think Cribl is an excellent tool for helping to manage data cost and keep it down as well as manage complexity.

Cribl has come a long way. I've been using it for three years, but there are still a lot of other features that I would appreciate regarding new data sources. One example would be open WebSockets.

There's currently not a native feature for that, so that requires a lot of time in development. I would also appreciate better support for JWT tokens for a REST API collection. While sometimes it does work, it seems very janky and seems like a stitched-together solution. It would be nice if there was a more supported version to help with JWT.

I've been working with Cribl for a long time, at least three years, maybe more.

Cribl is very robust. It's not perfect, but very good stability.

Cribl is very scalable. The product itself lends itself well to being scaled. Any issues I've had with scaling have mainly just been human issues of people not wanting to scale, but the product itself is very capable of scaling.

The speed was fast. The quality, however, there wasn't a solution just because I think it was a bug and it was never fixed as far as I know. The speed was nice, but there was never a solution provided.

Negative

I use Splunk.

From what I understand, I'm mainly on the engineering side, not the sales side, but the pricing is very competitive. Although the pricing can be a little bit high, I know that Cribl as a product helps save a lot of money by reducing data storage. The pricing is offset by the money I save by using Cribl.

Cribl does require maintenance, especially if I'm deploying it on-premises. If I'm deploying on-premises on my machines, I've just got to make sure that they're being provisioned well, that they're being updated successfully, and that they're constantly balancing the worker processing across them.

I definitely prefer Cribl more, mainly for the UI and the preview feature that I mentioned about being able to see in real time my in and out for development. I think that speeds things up a lot.

However, I do like Splunk a lot too.

I think Splunk is better tailored for visualizations and presenting to clients, especially around metrics. I think I can do some visualizations and presentations of metrics in Cribl, but it's not as robust as Splunk.

Definitely for large corporations, they would see the most benefit, but I think small and medium businesses could also benefit as well.

We mainly use Cribl for data optimization and log reporting to clean up the data and determine how to pass and provide this data to Splunk, which we are using. Cribl serves as a pipeline for us.

Cribl has impacted our organization very positively. Our management team was previously very concerned about costs. If we were using the traditional method, we would be giving every log to Splunk, and it became very messy and tough to handle. Because of Cribl, we have experienced very high impact in cost efficiency, data clarity, and data optimization. It has been a very big impact.

The best feature is data cleaning and data optimization, which has reduced our costs significantly. Cost optimization can be counted as one of the valuable features.

My experience with the UI is very decent compared to others, and it is very good.

Cribl handles fire logs very well because we are getting logs from many of our applications. We collect the data from APIs and everything, and it works very well with fire logs.

Cribl has handled our needs very easily and very stably. We have depended on it, and it works very well. Data costs have become very low, making it more reliable in terms of cost efficiency.

The main improvement is to provide a very clear and comprehensive user manual.

Another main improvement I would like to see is if we could get an advanced monitoring system or advanced monitoring capability, we could use Cribl in a very advanced way.

We have been using Cribl for mainly around ten months.

Cribl is very stable. Once the pipeline is configured properly, it runs consistently, even with high volume. We have not faced any major issues.

From my experience, Cribl is quite scalable and very scalable. We are using it with very high volume, and it is very scalable.

Cribl's customer service is good. We have tried contacting them one or two or three times, and it has been good.

We are using Splunk currently, but we were giving logs directly to Splunk without any clarity, without any cleaning, and without any optimization. We were giving everything to Splunk, and because of this, it became very messy. We had to make a call to Splunk's help section for assistance. Now that we are using Cribl, it is very good, and we do not have to rely on Splunk's support to help us.

Cribl's initial setup is quite complex. That is why I am recommending that they provide a very comprehensive user manual.

We integrated Cribl by ourselves.

Cribl is reliable, and while the ROI is not as significant as other metrics, we have already exceeded it because the costs are very low.

The costing part is not something I directly handle, but from what I know, the setup cost is very low.

We have not checked any other options because this option has matched our requirements.

I would like to recommend providing a very clear and comprehensive user manual so that any newcomer or new customer can understand it very easily. Our review rating for Cribl is nine.

Cribl is used to manage routing of different log systems and vulnerability type log scanning and retention, which is then re-routed to log retention servers. Firewall logs are sent directly from firewalls into Splunk, which is where Cribl also sends data, so Cribl is bypassed for firewalls. Cribl is primarily utilized for internal servers, systems, and endpoints.

The ability to make different variations and adjustments within Cribl to scan for specific items or to get an overall scan is valuable. Cribl's ability to contain data cost and complexity makes the system much easier to use. The cost is higher than preferred, but it is considered the cost of doing business. Data ingestion costs increase with higher ingestion levels, but by maintaining similar or lower levels and refining tuning and ingestion as it comes, costs have been maintained and remain within expectations.

Cribl's interface is user-friendly and easy to learn, making it simple to teach new users how to use it.

Cribl handles a high volume of diverse data types very well, such as logs and metrics. However, the endpoint plug-in tool can use some refinement, as it tends to hit system resources and can sometimes be detrimental to systems to the point where it must be turned off and a scan restarted when a user is offline.

Outside of the endpoint issue, there may not be much that Cribl can do better in the program itself. It becomes tedious when one-off fixes are needed because a user submits a ticket complaining that their system is unusable due to Cribl performing a scan.

Cribl has been used for approximately six years in a career, not necessarily on this job only.

No lagging, crashing, downtime, or instability has been observed in Cribl itself, only in the endpoint scanner. The system itself has been very solid.

Cribl is fairly easy to scale. If ingestion levels need to increase or decrease, adding new nodes is not an issue. Adding the endpoint scanner is not difficult and is fairly easy to use and upscale as needed.

Customer support or technical support through a ticket or email has not been contacted personally. The DevOps team, which handles maintenance updates, has contacted support when running into an issue, which may occur once a year if that, so nothing major has been cause for concern.

The initial deployment of Cribl was somewhat tedious due to the environment being specialized and restricted in an air-gapped setup, so everything had to be built on-premise. This made deployment more difficult when unable to reach the internet to get updates. It took some time, but this was strictly due to the restricted environment, as everything had to be placed on a hard drive, brought across, updated, and then troubleshot through that effort.

No alternatives to Cribl have been tried because there has been no need to.

Cribl requires routine updates, with no other real maintenance required. This review is rated an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

We've been using Cribl for about one year.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using Cribl for a few months since July of 2025.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

I did not use other solutions before Cribl that do the same thing as Cribl does.

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.

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.

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.

I did not consider other solutions in my company before choosing Cribl.

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.

The use case is for data log optimization and log rerouting. Along with log optimization and log rerouting, we have been using Cribl for data lakes.

Overall, Cribl has improved my organization. The reduction in firewall logs has influenced my data processing workflow. When we talk about data optimization, these events ingested into Cribl are basically the raw info, raw logs. Enhancing those events to optimize, to add new fields or to remove the extra fields that are of no use helps us in log reduction by dumping the raw logs and only ingesting the interested fields, which helps us in 50 to 60% volume reduction.

We can change the log format in case any data feed is ingesting logs in some different format, so we can reformat the logs and send those logs into some JSON format or any other format that is more understandable to any normal person. 

Cribl has been able to manage and take care of a high volume or any outburst of logs. We are able to manage those by creating alerts whenever resource thresholds are being breached so we can scale up the workers.

The best feature in Cribl is the UI, which is user-friendly. Apart from being user-friendly, you can have integration with Git, GitHub, and other config version controlling tools that we need. You can integrate them as well. Currently, I'm using GitHub, so it's quite easy to integrate it with GitHub and use it. We have multiple source integrations available, with multiple destinations being supported by Cribl. I'm using a cloud version which is not hosted in Cribl; it's on our own cloud that we have hosted. It's a containerized version that we are using for Cribl. It's quite easy to patch the Cribl host as well.

Given the dynamic nature, we can create workers, worker nodes on the fly. We can increase or decrease the worker nodes as per our requirements. For knowledge objects, we can have the lookups added and we can do the filtering based on lookups. We can use the custom packs as well to enhance our logs. 

Log enhancement is another feature, and when I say log optimization, this has been one of the best features for Cribl where you can reduce the log size by filtering the selective logs, enhancing the log quality by filtering the requested fields within the logs and filtering out the unnecessary garbage value within our logs.

Another interesting feature is that you can have the logs rerouted to multiple destinations, whether it be S3 bucket or any SIEM solution, any data lake, or any third-party tool. 

Over the period, we have upgraded Cribl, and earlier it did not support multiple sources. Now with the upgrades, it has integrated with multiple new sources and different integration mechanisms such as Wiz, TCP, Syslog; all those functionalities have been excellent.

In terms of areas for improvement, I would say Cribl internal logging has been one of the bottlenecks; that should be enhanced. If we can have more internal logs and more debug logs to validate the error, that would be beneficial because instead of reaching out to Cribl support, we can troubleshoot and find the root cause ourselves.

Currently, Cribl only provides monitoring for the data that is being ingested. If Cribl could store metrics for the data that has been ingested in the past, that would be valuable because there have been certain scenarios where tenants mentioned they are not receiving the logs from the past. There's no way to go back and check whether Cribl received those logs or not. If there could be metrics that could help us provide how much data for a particular week we received, it would be very beneficial.

Another enhancement I would expect is if Cribl could have more dashboards for troubleshooting, which would be very beneficial. I would expect Cribl to provide those troubleshooting dashboards to troubleshoot and try the errors, as it becomes tough to understand where the root cause is when an issue occurs. If Cribl can have more alerts defined in itself, rather than relying on any SIEM solution to forward the logs and configure the alerts over there, having Cribl itself with alerting mail notifications or SNS would be very beneficial.

I have been using this solution for almost one and a half or two years.

I would rate the stability as ten out of ten. The platform has been stable unless there have been unforeseen circumstances such as an outburst of logs that the team has not been informed of. In such cases, I've seen some outages, but this is not caused by Cribl. This has been caused by the source team or the ops team.

Regarding scalability, the current Cribl certifications available on Cribl support are good. User, admin, and edge certifications are very good. I enrolled for one of the certifications that required instructor-led training, but I couldn't find the slots for that.

It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten. I've kept two points for improvisation in terms of internal logging. Given the scenario that whenever there is an issue, we may have to engage support, if they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.

Positive

Deployment is somewhat easy, but I would appreciate it if Cribl can provide more documentation on Cribl deployments. They need to upscale their knowledge base. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on the environment; if the initial requirement is just to have a few workers and the leader spin up, it should not take much time. If the initial setup is huge, then it depends on how many sources need to be integrated and where we are hosting it. If it is Cribl Cloud, it would be easier, but if it's a hybrid one, some complexity depends on the sort of environment you have.

I have not conducted much analysis on the return on investment part, but in the POCs that I have done in different projects and in the current one, there has been almost 30% return over investment available. However, it varies from project to project and requirements as well. If there's a requirement only to do the filtering and enhance the log and optimize them, it has helped, but in those cases where log optimization is not required, only enhancement is required, it has somewhat varied. In the case of optimization, it has helped return on investment to somewhere close to 50%.

Regarding pricing, nothing comes free. Obviously, when we are using Cribl, it has a cost associated, but over time, the licensing cost has increased, given the scenario that Cribl is gaining popularity.

Given the scenario that it's a new tool in the market, it has been promising enough. With the features and functionalities that it offers, it's been very good.

I would recommend Cribl to other users, especially if someone is looking to optimize their logs and do volume reduction. But everything comes at a price. If you are not utilizing it to the max, you won't be able to get a good return on investment. Always ensure that whenever you have such things in place, you have the complete benefits of that particular functionality being used.

I would rate Cribl an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

I've been using Cribl for over three years now.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

When deploying Cribl, the process went very smooth because we had a Cribl engineer on our side who helped us significantly.

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.

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.

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.

We work on Splunk, so we use Cribl. Our company works with a system where approximately 12 to 15 TB of data comes daily in Splunk. We don't store the data directly into Splunk; instead, we use Cribl first. By using Cribl, it removes unnecessary data and keeps the important data, which can reduce the size.

My favorite feature is that Cribl is connected with Splunk very easily and it routes the data. The filtering is the most important feature because it removes unwanted logs, and the central control manages everything from one place. Cribl provides pipelines, which process the data step-by-step, so all the features are very useful.

It is very difficult to learn as a beginner.

I sometimes experience downtime, and by that, we sometimes miss logs, which creates a problem, but not for a long time. Sometimes we face these issues.

I have been using Cribl for four months.

I sometimes experience downtime, and by that, we sometimes miss logs, which creates a problem, but not for a long time. Sometimes we face these issues.

I have a very good experience with customer support. When we are in trouble, they give us fast responses and good responses, which is very useful for us.

The initial deployment when I first started using Cribl was not that difficult. As a beginner, I think it is a little difficult, not that much easy. However, once you start learning and become an experienced user, it is very easy. One person can handle the whole setup without needing a large team.

Cribl's interface is very good, and it is easy to understand how to use Cribl. When I started to use Cribl, it wasn't that difficult to learn. I learned how to pass the data into Cribl, so it is easy. Cribl has a good user interface, which makes work easier for me. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.