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 ›In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the origins of observability and why you need it. In this blog (Part 2), we will cover exactly what observability is, what it isn’t, and how to get started.
Before we can dive into how to approach observability, let’s get one thing clear: You can’t buy a one-size-fits-all observability solution. That’s because observability isn’t just an evolution of monitoring, although almost 100% of articles you read compare and contrast the two. Observability is a concept, a goal, and direction you want to drive your organization to gain the most insight from the data you can collect.
For me, the best comparison to network observability is network security, you can’t buy it, but you can build it. Sure, you can buy a new firewall to provide increased security, but a firewall is just a security component, not a full-fledged security solution. You wouldn’t compare security to a firewall because it isn’t really comparing apples to apples. The same is true when comparing monitoring and observability — you can’t say one is better or an evolution of the other. Firewalls are a security component, just like monitoring is a component of observability.
Observability is better described as a methodology you incorporate into your enterprise architecture to provide greater visibility to what is occurring.
We’re at the point now in the lifecycle of observability where it’s become more of a marketing buzzword than a set of fully understood principles. Don’t believe me? Go to any IT industry trade show and you will see about 80% of the booths have observability stamped on the side. That being said, they are not actually wrong. The hype is real. After all, venture capitalists have invested over $2 billion in the industry to date and they don’t tend to waste money on just hype, so what’s it all really about?
Because observability is a concept and not a specific product, you must first define what observability means to you and your organization, this means defining your needs and then selecting the components required — and just like all the best toys, some assembly is required — but the good news is that you’ll likely have some of the pieces already in place. So, If you have a Splunk, Datadog, Syslog, any of the hundreds of other observability tools from vendors, or even if you’re just using SNMP traps, you’re already capturing data. They’re all part of your observability solution.
One way to build your observability solution is to look at it the same way you would a security solution. If you’re in the market for improved security for your network, you can’t just ‘go out and buy it.’ All you can do is purchase security components that you will need to architecture to meet your unique security needs. That’s really how you should approach observability too.
As with security, there are no out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solutions for security or observability because what your company requires is going to be very different from the rest. Just like a mom-and-pop sandwich shop will have much different security needs than a bank, each organization will have its own approach and requirements for observability.
Once you figure out exactly what you need and collect all the components, build or buy, and get a solid foundation going for your observability architecture, you’re still not done. Your observability needs will continue to evolve The devices, applications, threats, and capabilities of the systems you deploy are dynamic, so continuous integration and continuous deployment are required. It’s best to think of your observability solution along the lines of an OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. You must constantly be taking note of and adjusting to the changing environments.
This is how observability will evolve. You’ll complete certain things, then start over each week, month, or quarter because there might be something you’ll need to adjust to. It might be a great new application launched. One of your colleagues in SecOps might need to learn a bit more about a threat, or someone from business intelligence might want to examine some specific data you have. Observability constantly evolves and grows, so setting things up right from the start is in the best interest of your organization.
There are a lot of great tools out there, but getting locked into one vendor can make it rain on your observability parade. Every organization already has some existing observability infrastructure that involves multiple applications – as such, Cribl doesn’t believe in a rip and replace approach to your existing tools. We believe in complementing what you already have and then offering you the choice to add additional capabilities. If you have Splunk, DataDog, AWS, Elastic, Kubernetes, or any of the other dozens of applications we integrate with, our vendor-agnostic products like Stream and Edge sit right in the middle (…or right at the edge!) of your data sources and destinations to make sharing data easy.
Want to learn more? Check out our on-demand webinar: Observability: Everything You’ve Heard is WRONG (Almost).
Experience a full version of Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge in the cloud with pre-made sources and destinations.
Classic choice. Sadly, our website is designed for all modern supported browsers like Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari
Got one of those handy?