

Elastic Search and Cribl are key competitors in the data management and search solutions space. Elastic Search holds an edge due to its powerful full-text search and scalability, whereas Cribl showcases strength in data routing and cost efficiency.
Features: Elastic Search provides robust full-text search capabilities and visualization via Kibana. It is acknowledged for its scalability and stability. Cribl excels with flexible data routing and log reduction, offering real-time data transformation and a seamless user interface.
Room for Improvement: Elastic Search faces challenges with its memory resource demands and onboarding experience. It can also improve its user interface. Cribl could enhance its scalability for high data loads and improve internal logging features along with offering more built-in templates.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Elastic Search is supported by a strong community and detailed documentation, though user reviews of its technical support are mixed. Cribl is praised for responsive support and an intuitive deployment process.
Pricing and ROI: Elastic Search’s open-source model offers cost efficiency but can become expensive due to memory usage. Cribl offers reasonable pricing, especially in comparison to Splunk, providing cost-effective log ingestion and operational savings.
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.
The second thing is that data aggregation, sampling, and reduction that we're able to do of the data, lowering our overall data volume, both traversing the network as well as what's being stored inside of our final solutions.
In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
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.
Sometimes by hearing the problem itself, they will know what the solution is, and they will let us know how to resolve it, and we do it immediately.
The customer support for Elastic Search is one of the best I have ever tried.
They have always been really responsible and responsive to my requests.
It has been sufficient to visit conferences such as SCALE in Southern California Linux Expo, where Elastic Search has a booth to talk to their staff.
The infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
Compared to other SIEM tools I use, any slight change on the operating system end impacts a lot on our SIEM tools and other things, but Cribl performs well in that regard.
Cribl performs effectively across both market segments.
We can search through that document quite easily, sometimes in 7 milliseconds, sometimes one or two milliseconds.
Performance tests involving one million requests at once, we encountered issues with shards and nodes not upscaling as needed, leading to crashes and minimal data loss.
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
Regarding scalability, we started with zero servers and have around 285 servers now.
Cribl is designed to deal with certain kinds of loads and is not designed to handle any scenario in the market.
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
When you put one keyword, everything related to that keyword in your ecosystem will showcase all the results.
A more stringent role-based access control feature would enhance security and allow granular control over what users can see and access.
When passing query logs or DNS logs, if certain malicious query patterns need to be identified or if fast-flux attacks are happening, Cribl can report that and those would definitely be a plus for them.
I would advise others looking to implement Cribl that if they are evolving Cribl Search, it would be very interesting to see more capability, more flexibility, and more ways to share the data similar to Splunk.
From a technical point of view, there are no significant issues recalled as Elastic Search has been absolutely awesome for this use case and covers 100% of the needs.
If I need to parse one million records saved into Elastic Search, it becomes a nightmare because I need to do the pagination, and it is very problematic in that regard.
Observability features like search latency, indexing rate, and maybe rejected requests should be added to make the platform more reliable and accessible for everyone.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
It was cheaper than the Splunk license.
Splunk is more expensive, and Cribl appears to be more affordable.
On the AWS side, it is very expensive because they charge based on query basis or how much data is transferred in and out, making it very expensive.
Having the hosted solution and not having to pay for essentially a DevOps person on staff to manage makes it affordable.
You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
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.
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Cribl | 40.7% |
| DataBahn | 13.1% |
| Onum | 12.5% |
| Other | 33.69999999999999% |
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Elastic Search | 12.0% |
| Lucidworks | 6.3% |
| OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) | 6.1% |
| Other | 75.6% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 27 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 34 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 38 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 46 |
Cribl offers advanced data transformation and routing with features such as data reduction, plugin configurations, and log collection within a user-friendly framework supporting various deployments, significantly reducing data volumes and costs.
Cribl is designed to streamline data management, offering real-time data transformation and efficient log management. It supports seamless SIEM migration, enabling organizations to optimize costs associated with platforms like Splunk through data trimming. The capability to handle multiple data destinations and compression eases log control. With flexibility across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments, Cribl provides an adaptable interface that facilitates quick data model replication. While it significantly reduces data volumes, enhancing overall efficiency, there are areas for improvement, including compatibility with legacy systems and integration with enterprise products. Organizations can enhance their operational capabilities through certification opportunities and explore added functionalities tailored towards specific industry needs.
What are Cribl's most important features?Cribl sees extensive use in industries prioritizing efficient data management and cost optimization. Organizations leverage its capabilities to connect between different data sources, including cloud environments, improving both data handling and storage efficiency. Its customization options appeal to firms needing specific industry compliance and operational enhancements.
Elasticsearch is a prominent open-source search and analytics engine known for its scalability, reliability, and straightforward management. It's a favored choice among enterprises for real-time data search, analysis, and visualization. Open-source Elasticsearch is free, offering a comprehensive feature set and scalability. It allows full control over deployments but requires managing and maintaining the infrastructure. On the other hand, Elastic Cloud provides a managed service with features like automated provisioning, high availability, security, and global reach.
Elasticsearch excels in handling time-sensitive data and complex search requirements across large datasets. Its scalability allows it to handle growing data volumes efficiently, maintaining high performance and fast response times. Integrated with Kibana, Elasticsearch enables powerful data visualization, providing real-time insights crucial for data-driven decision-making.
Elastic Cloud reduces operational overhead and improves scalability and performance, though it comes with associated costs. It is available on your preferred cloud provider — AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Customers who want to manage the software themselves, whether on public, private, or hybrid cloud, can download the Elastic Stack.
At its core, Elasticsearch is renowned for its full-text search capabilities, capable of performing complex queries and supporting features like fuzzy matching and auto-complete.
Peer reviews from various professionals highlight its strengths and weaknesses. Pros include its detection and correlation features, flexibility, cloud-readiness, extensibility, and efficient search capabilities. However, users have noted challenges like steep learning curves, data analysis limitations, and integration complexities. The platform is generally viewed as stable and scalable, with varying degrees of satisfaction regarding its usability and feature set.
In summary, Elasticsearch stands out for its high-speed search, scalability, and versatile analytics, making it a go-to solution for organizations managing large datasets. Its adaptability to different enterprise needs, robust community support, and continuous development keep it at the forefront of enterprise search and analytics solutions. However, potential users should be aware of its learning curve and the need for skilled personnel for optimization.
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