Cribl.Cloud Suite

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 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.

The product is very good. They could add more AI-assisted pipeline development in the future release.

I have been using Cribl for six months.

I haven't seen any lagging or crashing with Cribl.

Cribl's scalability is very good.

I have never contacted the technical support or customer support of Cribl.

Positive

The initial deployment when I first started with Cribl was fairly easy, very easy.

We were a team for this job.

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.

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.

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.

Cribl is a stable product, however, there are areas for improvement. Their documentation should be updated.

I have been using Cribl for a year and a half.

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.

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.

I have not reached out to Cribl support. That said, my colleagues have.

Positive

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.

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.

We are a partner with Cribl. We have CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike has partnered with Cribl; they even changed the name to CrowdStream.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We started using Cribl around three months ago.

I would rate stability as a nine; nothing is perfect, but it's great. 

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.

Their customer support is fantastic.

Positive

We were using a manual solution previously; this transition to Cribl is our first time implementing an automated solution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

I have been working with Cribl for more than four years now.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

I delivered Cribl services as a Certified Cribl Consultant to various customers. Cribl technical support was arranged whenever there was a need for it.

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. 

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.

Confluent  was considered, but Cribl emerged as the best solution.

I would rate Cribl an eight out of ten.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.