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Azure Monitor vs Cribl comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.9
Azure Monitor offers cost-effectiveness and proactive visibility, with pay-as-you-go flexibility and potential savings despite mixed ROI feedback.
Sentiment score
5.5
Cribl reduces costs, enhances efficiency, and automates tasks, significantly lowering SIEM expenses and data ingestion costs for organizations.
Azure Monitor helps prevent impacts on their system.
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.
In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
In the case of optimization, it has helped return on investment to somewhere close to 50%.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Azure Monitor support is generally positive, with high-priority users obtaining quicker responses, while others report variable experiences.
Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support is praised for quick, effective responses, knowledgeable staff, and valuable resources, despite needing better customer requirement understanding.
However, the second-line support is good.
Users end up getting no resolution from their team because they're outsourced vendors, and they don't have deeper expertise over any of the products they are referring to.
I would rate the support for Azure Monitor as a seven.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
Usually, within an hour, we get a response, and we are able to work with them back and forth until we resolve the issues.
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Azure Monitor efficiently scales across industries, integrating well with services, and reliably supports growing infrastructure and application needs.
Sentiment score
6.4
Cribl offers scalable workload distribution and seamless cloud integration, efficiently scaling from small organizations to large enterprises.
Azure Monitor is very scalable; there are no issues with scalability for different kinds of businesses.
The infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
I don't need to talk to a Cribl engineer to connect a new log source.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Azure Monitor is stable and reliable with high ratings, but could improve in alerting compared to competitors.
Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl is generally stable and reliable, with minor issues mitigated by improvements, strong support, and effective documentation.
Azure Monitor is working fine, yet I face a costing issue as if there are a lot of logs collected in the workspace or in the center, it becomes very costly.
Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
If the pipeline is down and we receive an alert that it's not sending information to the log collection platform for more than one or two hours, if we receive an alert, it would be great.
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Monitor requires better integration, user experience, automation, alerting, support, cost clarity, and improved interface and performance monitoring.
Cribl should enhance compatibility, improve user interface, offer training, optimize performance, and expand features to boost functionality and usability.
If Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel.
The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor.
The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components.
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.
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.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Azure Monitor's flexible pricing is generally competitive, but costs can rise due to storage and integration needs.
Cribl offers cost-effective pricing with scalability and efficiency, appreciated for handling large data volumes despite annual price increases.
When I export logs into the application, workspace, log analytic workspace, and into Sentinel to read reports, I need to add storage, which increases the cost.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
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.
 

Valuable Features

Azure Monitor provides seamless integration, robust security, dynamic alerting, and efficient reporting, enhancing user satisfaction with scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Cribl transforms and manages data efficiently with scalable, intuitive UI, enhancing integration, reducing storage costs, and maintaining integrity.
The alerting features definitely help in reducing operational downtime for my customers by allowing us to get notifications in advance and take active actions.
Resource monitoring is essential.
The ease of access in Azure is significant because it's native to the platform and easy to integrate.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
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.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd)
Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 4.9%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Azure Monitor4.9%
Cribl1.1%
Other94.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Usman Khawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Native integration simplifies monitoring but documentation and cost improvements are needed
The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features. The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently. They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature. Azure Monitor is stable and scalable. Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.
Richard McIver - PeerSpot reviewer
Simplifies data processing and reduces ingest costs through real-time transformation
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components. Azure Monitor is one thing, but within Azure Monitor, you need to bring Log Analyti...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
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 inexpensi...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
The product is very good. They could add more AI-assisted pipeline development in the future release.
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
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'...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Cribl and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.