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CA App Synthetic Monitor vs Cribl comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

CA App Synthetic Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
68th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (3rd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (7th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cribl1.2%
CA App Synthetic Monitor0.5%
Other98.3%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2286675 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
A reliable solution for SSL offloading and to encrypt outside traffic
If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on it.
Aman Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has helped reduce daily log volume significantly and streamline data routing across multiple destinations
Regarding complexity, as I mentioned before, Cribl is very simple to use. When I started 2.5 years ago, it was very easy to learn. I learned Cribl within a week, and even though I was a fresher at the time, it was easy to understand and not complex enough that someone would need to spend money on labs. It's not that complex to learn. Regarding cost efficiency, it's very good because nowadays the SIEM tools we use are too expensive on license, and SIEM tools base their license on how many logs get ingested. The unwanted logs, particularly firewall logs, represent a significant portion of unnecessary ingestion. Cribl saves our license by filtering out half of the firewall logs that are unwanted. Our main purpose for using Cribl is to save our license and save money. Currently, everyone is moving toward AI agents. We currently use regex, and AI agents could help us create those regex patterns to drop events or add raw data to events. Currently, we sit down, review the logs, and create regex patterns manually, which can be time-consuming. An AI agent could reduce this time. I read some articles indicating that Cribl Cloud has started using AI and considering MCPs and model context, but I'm not certain how far along they are. If Cribl asked me what they could improve, that would be my suggestion. The support is very good, and I had a few issues with Cribl where I raised support cases and received good responses, which is better than the quick response I didn't get from other SIEM tools and vendor tools I use. Compared to other SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper than Splunk and DataDogs. However, it's still a bit expensive from my point of view, though I won't call it expensive. Overall, I think 99% of companies use Cribl before their SIEM tools, and compared to SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper. Companies can use any SIEM tool such as Google, Splunk, or Cisco, and Cribl is cheaper than those SIEM tools. They might have a slight chance to reduce costs further, but I'm not the correct person to evaluate that since I'm more focused on the operational side. Regarding training, it was quite easy to grasp. It took me almost a week to understand the basic functionalities and what Cribl does. Getting more expertise took additional time, but basic functionalities and understanding what Cribl does took around four to five days. One point I want to mention is that Cribl could improve their labs or training materials in their Cribl Cloud or whatever portal they have.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."
"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."
"What I like most about Cribl is the overall pipeline structure and easiness."
"Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide."
"Cribl intelligently formats syslogs, extracting the data and reducing their size by almost 30 to 40 percent in my experience, stripping out null values and discarding what is not required so only what is needed is presented."
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"Overall, flexibility and control over observability data are the things I appreciate most about Cribl."
"The Stream product benefits us as it gives us the ability to reduce and streamline the logs that we have getting into our SIEM."
"Mostly because of the positive reasons, I would say it is easy to use, it is sustainable, the support is nice, the coding is quite easy to understand, there are a lot of functionalities there, you can do a lot of things, and the data migration is very easy."
"Enhancing those events to optimize, to add new fields or to remove the extra fields that are of no use helps us in log reduction by dumping the raw logs and only ingesting the interested fields, which helps us in 50 to 60% volume reduction."
 

Cons

"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."
"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."
"Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing."
"Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing."
"There have been several administrative issues. Another point is that the browsing functions aren't very intuitive."
"The main downside of Cribl is that it is not very beginner-friendly."
"I do not think that if the pricing is on the higher side, it could be suitable for all types of users, such as small or medium ones."
"It is very difficult to learn as a beginner."
"Cribl could be improved by some UI tweaks and some usability tweaks, mostly centered around error troubleshooting for large volumes of Edge nodes."
"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Regarding current pricing, it was based on an ingress-based model that we used, and it was favorable. It was cheaper than the Splunk license. We didn't have a problem with the purchase.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
Some downsides of Cribl include that it was quite a long sales cycle for us, but that was probably partly my fault as well. There weren't really any negatives on the product itself. Cribl can do be...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
My use cases for Cribl basically involve being part of a Splunk theme organization where I was brought in to do a soft confirmation program, and I was onboarding more and more logs into Cribl as my...
 

Also Known As

CA ASM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lexmark
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Find out what your peers are saying about CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Cribl and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.