

Honeycomb Enterprise and Cribl compete in the data management category. Honeycomb Enterprise leads with seamless data aggregation, while Cribl outperforms with advanced data routing.
Features: Honeycomb Enterprise includes complex query capabilities, real-time insights, and an intuitive UI for observability. Cribl offers versatile routing, extensive pipeline controls, and data replay flexibility.
Room for Improvement: Honeycomb Enterprise could benefit from improved AI-compatible features and enhanced data visualization. Expanding its dashboard choices and offering more security integrations would be advantageous. Cribl could improve its compatibility with non-cloud environments and reduce setup complexity. Simplifying its detailed documentation and enhancing cost-effectiveness would also be beneficial.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Honeycomb Enterprise offers cloud-native deployment and robust support for smooth onboarding. Cribl's flexible deployment and detailed documentation support its scalability and integration, backed by extensive customer support options.
Pricing and ROI: Honeycomb Enterprise provides adaptable pricing suitable for various budgets, ensuring ROI through operational efficiencies. Cribl, with higher initial costs, justifies these through advanced functionalities, promising cost savings with optimized data usage and efficiencies.
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.
Honeycomb Enterprise played a vital role in identifying the problems in the initial calls itself. That has actually saved us a lot of incidents.
The biggest return on investment with Honeycomb Enterprise is being able to find, if I am doing production support and something goes wrong, the exact scenario or the exact request and response and the details of that really quickly.
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.
To highlight what is the issue going on in our currently running 100 requests, we just highlight that one request which is very slow or maybe we just move it to the top so that we can alert everybody that this is the problem.
When I was looking at Honeycomb Enterprise support with Go Lambdas, it was a little tricky to find someone who could help me answer the question.
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.
When you send traces, you will get the complete view of the life of the code and how it has been executed.
Honeycomb Enterprise scales best when all the products in the company use it because it allows tracing outside of individual products to see how they interact.
At times we can be shocked to see that this price is too high for involving too many developers on one peak or having a much bigger data set or more advanced features for our use.
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.
They could not get proper tracing with Honeycomb Enterprise at that time.
In terms of stability and availability, this is an impressive one.
Mostly it is reliable, but at times, maybe one or two times in two to three months, these issues do happen.
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.
Rather, it must be treated as a powerful supplementary tool that augments the existing code security solutions (such as Snyk or Checkmarx) in a DevSecOps or Secure DevOps environment.
The main thing is that I think everything should very hard aim for the direction of being AI compatible because every engineer, or most engineers now use AI to code.
That is what performance engineers and SREs need to see for each request, where it spent the entire time; how many other services or databases it interacted with and what took more or less time.
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.
In terms of pricing, it was a little challenging to get the company to commit to the full pricing of Enterprise, but once we got there it was nice.
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.
We get alerts into Slack, and they work great. We see a lot of metrics go through into Slack, and they are really useful for keeping our team focused on only seeing one place to see alerts.
The most valuable feature of Honeycomb Enterprise for me is the root cause analysis part because it helps me greatly with the response messages and derived error messages which are very clearly mentioned in Honeycomb Enterprise logs.
Honeycomb Enterprise is designed for modern cloud native systems.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Cribl | 1.2% |
| Honeycomb Enterprise | 1.1% |
| Other | 97.7% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 46 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 34 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
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.
Honeycomb Enterprise is designed to optimize performance visibility, offering a robust platform for distributed system observability. It provides insights for complex data and aids in faster issue resolution, making it a valuable tool for IT professionals.
This tool is tailored for real-time data tracking and improving system performance efficiency. Enterprises benefit from its capacity to handle large-scale data, ensuring seamless operations and continuity. Honeycomb Enterprise helps teams to tackle data challenges head-on by delivering comprehensive analytics that enhance infrastructure reliability and performance metrics.
What Features Make Honeycomb Enterprise Stand Out?In industries like finance, e-commerce, and technology, Honeycomb Enterprise implementations demonstrate its utility in managing complex data flows and optimizing system reliability. Businesses in these sectors leverage its capabilities to maintain high service standards and operational efficiency.
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