Cribl puts your IT and Security data at the center of your data management strategy and provides a one-stop shop for analyzing, collecting, processing, and routing it all at any scale. Try the Cribl suite of products and start building your data engine today!
Learn more ›Evolving demands placed on IT and Security teams are driving a new architecture for how observability data is captured, curated, and queried. This new architecture provides flexibility and control while managing the costs of increasing data volumes.
Read white paper ›Cribl Stream is a vendor-agnostic observability pipeline that gives you the flexibility to collect, reduce, enrich, normalize, and route data from any source to any destination within your existing data infrastructure.
Learn more ›Cribl Edge provides an intelligent, highly scalable edge-based data collection system for logs, metrics, and application data.
Learn more ›Cribl Search turns the traditional search process on its head, allowing users to search data in place without having to collect/store first.
Learn more ›Cribl Lake is a turnkey data lake solution that takes just minutes to get up and running — no data expertise needed. Leverage open formats, unified security with rich access controls, and central access to all IT and security data.
Learn more ›The Cribl.Cloud platform gets you up and running fast without the hassle of running infrastructure.
Learn more ›Cribl.Cloud Solution Brief
The fastest and easiest way to realize the value of an observability ecosystem.
Read Solution Brief ›Cribl Copilot gets your deployments up and running in minutes, not weeks or months.
Learn more ›AppScope gives operators the visibility they need into application behavior, metrics and events with no configuration and no agent required.
Learn more ›Explore Cribl’s Solutions by Use Cases:
Explore Cribl’s Solutions by Integrations:
Explore Cribl’s Solutions by Industry:
September 25 | 10am PT / 1pm ET
Hold my beer: lessons from one team’s data pipeline journey
Register ›Try Your Own Cribl Sandbox
Experience a full version of Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge in the cloud.
Launch Now ›Get inspired by how our customers are innovating IT, security and observability. They inspire us daily!
Read Customer Stories ›Sally Beauty Holdings
Sally Beauty Swaps LogStash and Syslog-ng with Cribl.Cloud for a Resilient Security and Observability Pipeline
Read Case Study ›Experience a full version of Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge in the cloud.
Launch Now ›Transform data management with Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security
Learn More ›Cribl Corporate Overview
Cribl makes open observability a reality, giving you the freedom and flexibility to make choices instead of compromises.
Get the Guide ›Stay up to date on all things Cribl and observability.
Visit the Newsroom ›Cribl’s leadership team has built and launched category-defining products for some of the most innovative companies in the technology sector, and is supported by the world’s most elite investors.
Meet our Leaders ›Join the Cribl herd! The smartest, funniest, most passionate goats you’ll ever meet.
Learn More ›Whether you’re just getting started or scaling up, the Cribl for Startups program gives you the tools and resources your company needs to be successful at every stage.
Learn More ›Want to learn more about Cribl from our sales experts? Send us your contact information and we’ll be in touch.
Talk to an Expert ›May 30, 2023
In the data business, we often refer to the series of steps or processes used to collect, transform, and analyze data as “pipelines.” As a data scientist, I find this analogy fitting, as my concerns around data closely mirror those most people have with water: Where is it coming from? What’s in it? How can we optimize its quality, quantity, and pressure for its intended use? And, crucially, is it leaking anywhere?
As it turns out, many valuable lessons from the world of plumbing apply to data management. One key takeaway is the importance of control and relief valves, which help regulate water, volume, and pressure while allowing for the swift isolation of problems and risk management. In commercial plumbing, these valves are installed at virtually every water fixture and pipe connection, ensuring issues are quickly contained without disrupting the water supply for the rest of the building. Contrast this with residential plumbing, where a limited number of valves may necessitate shutting off the water for the entire house to address even minor issues.
If data is a critical resource for your organization, elevating your data plumbing to commercial standards by deploying a pipeline between your sources and destinations is essential. Here are a few areas where applying commercial plumbing best practices can significantly improve your pipeline infrastructure:
Controlling water pressure is crucial for a pleasant experience, helping to prevent the water explosion of an overpressurized sink and the frustration of taking an under-pressurized shower. Similarly, managing data pressure is vital to avoid performance degradation, unexpected costs, or loss.
When data explodes unexpectedly, in a brute force attack, port scanning event, or the dreaded self-pwn via malfunction or misconfiguration, the fallout can be costly. In addition to monetary costs, companies may also experience pipeline degradation or failure, leading to data loss and potential lapses in security coverage. Many organizations employ various solutions, such as elastic pipelines that dynamically adapt to changing data streams, advanced monitoring and alert software, and improved utilization of on-premise computing, in an effort to address this issue. However, despite these efforts, a significant number of organizations still lack the appropriate level of control and visibility required to effectively operate a modern enterprise.
Data pipelines can help to control data volume by employing purpose-built filtering and enrichment, as well as eliminating missing, duplicate, or unnecessary fields. They help reduce the amount of unnecessary data moving around the organization by collecting data once and creating custom streams for each use, containing only the necessary data.
The speed at which data can flow through an organization, known as data velocity, plays a crucial role in both performance and particularly security. Pipelines give security teams the ability to enrich data in near real-time, adding critical information like IP location, endpoint asset information, and standardized timestamps to logs before they’re ingested by the security platform. Absent a pipeline, enrichment typically happens within the security platform. Some add this enrichment data minutes to hours later, while others only add it when searching, meaning the data may have changed or may never be seen. By adding this data on ingestion, events are captured with complete information, and detections can be made at the moment.
Unexpected “leaks” or breaches can have serious consequences. For water pipelines, a leak can lead to property damage or even health hazards if the water becomes contaminated. Similarly, for data, a leak or breach can result in sensitive data being exposed, operations being interrupted, and loss of revenue. Data pipelines provide control over the flow of data from beginning to end and enable the quick detection and mitigation of contamination, leaks, and malfunctions. Pipelines also enable the monitoring of data flow and quality, providing critical visibility to help quickly identify leaks or contamination.
Just as shut-off valves can prevent water damage to a property, data management pipelines can help prevent “data damage” or loss. As attackers move up the supply chain, SaaS vendor agents and applications are becoming a common attack vector. In the event of a software vendor compromise, data pipelines allow data to be shut off or diverted to an alternate destination, such as a data lake. This prevents data loss while still stopping the flow of sensitive data to a compromised destination and helps reduce the potential for further data exfiltration.
Elevating your data pipelines to commercial standards is essential for organizations that rely heavily on data as a critical resource. Companies can boost the resilience, efficiency, and security of their data infrastructure by leveraging lessons from commercial plumbing, incorporating best practices to manage pressure, volume, and velocity, and effectively identifying and isolating leaks. Commercial-grade pipelines help organizations safeguard their most valuable asset—data—and maintain a competitive edge in today’s data-driven business landscape.
Judith Silverberg-Rajna Sep 10, 2024
Felicia Dorng Sep 3, 2024
Classic choice. Sadly, our website is designed for all modern supported browsers like Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari
Got one of those handy?