Cribl Increases Customer Adoption and Reduces Technology Barriers with an AWS Partner Solution

When Cribl was faced with the challenges of increasing customer adoption, reducing technology barriers and enabling faster time to deployment of Cribl Stream workloads to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, they worked with the AWS Integration and Automation team to design an AWS Partner Solution, an automated reference architecture built on AWS CloudFormation templates with integrated best practices. As a result, Cribl has seen both a 40% increase in traffic to Cribl’s AWS assets and a steady move of AWS users from single-instance deployments to either distributed deployments in their own AWS account or to Cribl’s cloud instances.

When Cribl launched Cribl Stream, their highly scalable observability pipeline, they immediately set out to increase customer adoption by removing migration barriers to the AWS Cloud. They wanted to invest in ways to help customers more quickly and easily migrate their data and support customers who weren’t savvy with AWS services and technologies.

Cribl’s sales team also needed a more streamlined way to demonstrate proof of value to Stream customers tasked with migrating their workloads to the cloud. A successful migration meant customers could get up and running on AWS with just a few clicks. The solution would have to be repeatable, efficient, and ready to be used immediately. Most importantly, Cribl and AWS wanted customers to have a positive customer experience.

According to Kam, one of the most attractive points about Partner Solutions is the ability to convert hundreds of manual procedures into an automated workflow. Because the solution uses an infrastructure-as-code model made available to anyone with a GitHub account, Kam was able to start contributing to the project almost immediately.

Kam was particularly impressed with the streamlined process for creating the deployment guide, which is built and published automatically using GitHub Pages, a hosting service that takes builds and hosts documentation directly from the repository where the code lives. All he had to do was add deployment details to a set of placeholder files.

Since launching the Cribl Stream on AWS Partner Solution in early 2022, customer adoption has steadily increased. Using Cribl’s free tier containing one terabyte of data per day, Cribl customers can play with their datasets in Cribl’s own SaaS environment or deploy a fully working solution to AWS using the Partner Solution in just a matter of minutes.

According to Kam, customers who use the Partner Solution to deploy to AWS are truly seeing the value of Cribl and starting to engage with the sales team sooner. Once they’ve experienced a successful proof-of-value test in their own AWS environment, customers feel more comfortable purchasing Cribl for their own organizations.

Internal usage of the Partner Solution is also incredibly high, especially among Cribl sales engineers. By deploying the Cribl solution, they can effectively build a scalable lab environment that they can tweak and manipulate, giving them a head start when engaging with customers.

The Partner Solution has also proven to be a valuable tool for testing and training environments. Using the deployed solution, customers can perform procedures in a test environment, then perform proof-of-value testing on the production side. Customers essentially take the infrastructure from the deployment and redeploy it in their production instance.

For one federal customer who approached Cribl looking for an infrastructure that could accommodate high-security installations, this was an ideal use case. Kam and his team pointed them to the Cribl Stream on AWS Partner Solution in the AWS Marketplace so they could perform a test build within their own system using their security measures. In just a few minutes, they had a fully functioning AWS solution inside their own secure environment, and that was all the proof they needed to start engaging with the Cribl sales team.

Since launching the Partner Solution in May of 2022, Cribl has seen a 40% increase in traffic for their AWS assets. They’ve also experienced a steady path of AWS users moving from single-instance deployments to either distributed deployments in their own AWS account or to Cribl’s cloud instances. According to Kam, the Partner Solution has been a significant reason for these improvements. Non-AWS administrators can now deploy Cribl on AWS more quickly because they aren’t required to learn how to build the infrastructure or perform manual configuration steps, allowing them to focus on the data and get up and running in just a few minutes.