Cribl Reviews

Cribl is used for log management and SIEM in terms of optimization of the data that we are collecting.

The flexibility that Cribl provides allows us to manage the data and work with the data effectively.

Implementing Cribl has optimized the infrastructure that we have and is improving the optimization of the services that we are providing.

Other than the Cribl module that we are using, Cribl Search has several modules, so there is room to improve that capability in Cribl.

In Cribl Search, the language and the flexibility in querying the data can be improved because it is not as good as other solutions.

Cribl Search does not currently help search data in place for investigative issues or answer questions across our data stores at this moment because we are not using it at that level yet, but hopefully in the future.

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.

I have around three and a half years of experience working with Cribl.

Cribl's stability is an eight.

For scalability, I would rate it a ten.

I would rate the technical support as an eight.

I would compare Cribl with other solutions or vendors as mature. We have seen another solution similar but not as mature as Cribl at the moment.

I am talking about the Data Stream Processor from Splunk and also Omnium from Spain.

Cribl is easy to deploy; the team managing the deployment did not report any concerns about the complexity of the deployment of the solution.

The deployment is straightforward; it is just a matter of coordination with other teams, but everything was released in one day.

Regarding the firewall logs with Cribl, the digression of the data that we are experiencing thanks to Cribl is amazing. Although I cannot provide exact numbers, the reduction is significant.

I use Cribl Stream, Cribl Lake, and Cribl Search. My experience with Cribl Search and Cribl Lake is just initial; we are just starting to use them. Cribl Stream is the optimization we are using right now in terms of data collection and data management and is more mature.

Cribl Search has changed my approach to long-term log retention and historical investigation.

I would rate this review an eight overall.

My current use cases mostly involve using Cribl before Splunk to reduce the license by normalizing the logs, by reducing the raw data and dropping the unwanted data. Cribl can process different formats, and the team can easily adopt it, so any data will be modified. These are the use cases, as I mostly use Cribl for Splunk purposes. Additionally, if I am required to send the data to other destinations, I can use Cribl because during a migration process, I typically have two similar solutions to send the data to those two particular destinations.

For instance, if auto information is not available, Cribl will remove it from the log itself.

If the firewall logs are needed for security or IT purposes, I can easily send them to different destinations.

What I like the most about Cribl is its Web UI feature, which is totally user-friendly and has many functions that can change the data structure. That is the main thing I appreciate. I can also reduce the size of particular items, and since Splunk's license is high, this functionality is very helpful. This is the main feature, but for this purpose only, I am using it. Most of the tasks are handled in Cribl, which makes it easier for Splunk to parse the data and maintain SIM compliance.

Cribl handles high volumes of diverse data types, including logs and metrics, quite effectively. It has separate handling for metrics and can manage them easily based on size. Prior to handling data, the appropriate memory size for the CPU needs to be determined to accommodate a higher amount of logs and metrics.

Cribl acts as a super product because it enables one source to send to multiple destinations using only one copy.

To develop user skills in Cribl, it needs to improve some certifications, as the ones I have taken are not entirely helpful in the main projects for the clients. The documentation requires more improvement in the certification aspect to better develop user skills.

I have been working with Cribl for two years.

Cribl's stability is good, with no issues present. I have been working with it for two years, and it is only helpful in changing the data.

For scalability, I would mark it as nine out of ten.

I have contacted the technical support for Cribl, and I found their service to be good. I faced an issue for one of my customers who couldn't send the universal forwarder internal logs to display in the monitoring console. They quickly resolved this by enabling something in their worker, allowing the customer to receive all the information they required.

Positive

I have not used any alternatives to Cribl; there is no similar product I have utilized.

The initial deployment of Cribl is easy, with a few steps similar to Splunk. The installation process is straightforward, and ample information is available in the documents. All the documentation can be found in Cribl university.

I remember that it takes approximately two hours to fully deploy Cribl for the first time, especially for clustering. For the deployment of the leader and the workers, if all the requirements are met, including network requirements with no port issues, I can deploy Cribl base within that timeframe.

One person is enough to deploy Cribl; a team is not necessary.

I have seen a decrease in firewall logs with Cribl; I have almost a thirty percent decrease when estimating usage. Cribl effectively reduces unwanted logs, eliminating what is not required or what is unavailable.

Regarding pricing, I find it okay because Cribl is used to reduce the costs associated with Splunk. Comparatively, the Splunk license pricing is acceptable, so I have no issues with the pricing. Customers prefer to use Cribl instead of the Splunk license due to these benefits.

I have not used any alternatives to Cribl; there is no similar product I have utilized.

I have no dislikes about Cribl, but I notice that there is only an extra product in between when using Splunk. However, if I have different destinations, Cribl acts as a super product because it enables one source to send to multiple destinations using only one copy.

Their ongoing improvisation means they are consistently getting new features, and they are continuously improving.

I would give Cribl a score of nine out of ten.

For Cribl, we use only Stream, which we are using as a data pipeline in between our environment and the SIEM console. We have two SIEMs: one is a cloud SIEM and one is an on-prem SIEM. On-prem, we are using another user and entity behavior analysis tool, so we have a redirection or a copy of a log for user login and logout information. Then we have a SIEM console, and we have redirections to the SIEM through Cribl. From the environment, we have a load balancer, and from the load balancer, we have this data pipeline configured to different SIEMs, and then we have that data transferred to two different SIEMs.

Cribl's ability to handle high volumes of diverse data types is exactly the purpose that we took it for, and as far as I have seen for the last nine months, it is handling well without issues. Connectivity-wise, there is some problem, but I'm not sure whether it's from the Cribl end or the SIEM end; we are working on both ends right now, so I don't see any problems concerning that. Cribl has helped in reducing informational logs between the main entity of our SIEM and the external entity, so that actually helped.

Regarding Cribl's solution, we have limited access to Stream. I'm not sure about the other three products. We only use the Stream of Cribl. If I suggest something, it may be available on the other products. I haven't worked on those. The suggestion would be more into log information, as I'm not able to view more logs because this is a limitation that we are only using for data pipelining. If we have more visibility or if the storage structure is already there, I'm not sure; if it is there, it would be fine.

Regarding stability, lagging only happens if I exceed my data analysis stuff, but it is a limitation with Cribl as per their design. We do not use it for that purpose, but if it is improved, it would be great. For scalability, I'm not sure in my project as we are using it only for a limited purpose. Maybe, if there was an environment that required more data transfers and logs to be filtered out, it would be good, and I would suggest it.

I have been using Cribl since we deployed it during November, which is close to nine months.

We are actually checking on a regular basis; however, the problem is with the connectivity of the data pipeline and the SIEM. It requires attention if there is an alert; for example, 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.

For scalability, I'm not sure in my project as we are using it only for a limited purpose. Maybe, if there was an environment that required more data transfers and logs to be filtered out, it would be good, and I would suggest it.

My engineering team contacts Cribl's technical support; I join the call in case any issues come up and I provide my suggestions.

Positive

Cribl is the first tool that I'm using for this particular data pipelining. We do have Dynatrace, but we use it for a different purpose, for monitoring. Cribl is for streaming purposes only, so the purpose is different. I'm not sure if there is a competitor for this particular tool or not, as I haven't worked with any competitor so far.

The initial installation was kind of easy to understand for me, while my teammates struggled a little bit, so I would say it was okay.

My engineering team contacts Cribl's technical support; I join the call in case any issues come up and I provide my suggestions.

Cribl is the first tool that I'm using for this particular data pipelining.

For everything, my suggestion and limitation as I told, if it were there, I would give Cribl 10 out of 10; since it's not, I'm giving nine out of 10. I am just a user of Cribl; my company has a license with them. I'm not sure if they have a partnership with Cribl or not. I rate Cribl nine out of 10.

Our use cases that we are exploring Cribl for right now are for data parsing and data manipulation.

The feature I appreciate most about Cribl is that it is really easy to use and quick to replicate data models on different data sets. We have over 1,000 log sources, and currently, we have to configure them individually with their own architecture. Cribl allows us to do a copy and paste architecture and saves us a lot of development time. It also makes it easy to add any sort of extra data parsing to specific lines. Ease of use is really our biggest benefit from it.

Something that Cribl could do better is processing time. There is not enough customization to improve performance. An example would be with AWS Lambda functions, the way we were doing it before. There are different strategies where the way we code it could save us more processing time and still have the same price. With Cribl, it is very much set in its ways. If you want better performance, then you have to pay for more resources.

The UI is a very beneficial thing that saves us a ton of time. I mentioned the copy and paste approach and little to no code anymore, as it is all UI interface-based now. There is little to no code that we do other than regex commands. If there was still some aspect of being able to add our own code, we could potentially get better performance. I understand this is the whole use case of Cribl, to remove the technical need aspect. You do not need as many experienced developers; you will pay for software and have to hire an analyst instead of an engineer and save money on wages. For how good the tool is, it would be nice to still have that data engineering aspect.

I have not been using Cribl in my career. We are a company that is interested in investing in it at the moment. However, we do have several teams that have used it and we have also had access to a dev workspace that we have used.

I have not had any issues. So far, everything has been good.

It is pretty scalable, just in terms of cost. If you have any problems, it is probably going to be more about having to pay for more resources.

Currently, we are using Logstash, and we are also exploring a POC with DataBahn. DataBahn is a newer company. They are not as sophisticated as Cribl, and the performance is probably not there, but they make up for it in cost.

Being new to Cribl, the setup was very easy.

For us, it could have been done with one person, but we had different team members involved just for exposure because we were onboarding it with many people. It could have been a one-person implementation, but two to three people would have been a good healthy number.

The current pricing is a little bit above average.

We are using around 25% of what Cribl offers, mainly focusing on log parsing, which is what Cribl started with. We use AWS as our main source of ingestion.

There is little flexibility in pricing. It is simply the market price, and you either pay it or you do not. Cribl has significant capacity to handle high volumes of diverse data types, such as logs and metrics. Cribl can handle almost anything we throw at it, as lonthe g as budget is not an issue.

There is a team in my company that uses them, but they are part of a separate company. We do not have any partnership with them yet.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Cribl an 8.

We use Cribl Stream to collect logs from multiple sources, transform and enrich them, filter out unnecessary data before sending them to SIEM. We also use Cribl to route logging to data lake.

Since we started using Cribl, it’s made a huge difference for us. We spend a lot less time building and maintaining things, so the team can focus on the security work that really matters and brings value. Plus, by filtering out all the noisy data we don’t need, we’ve been able to cut costs and make our data a lot cleaner.

One of the biggest things I love about Cribl is that you can actually see the output in real time before you push anything to production. The UI makes it super easy to work with, and honestly, it saves a ton of time. Plus, it’s way easier to collaborate—everyone’s on the same page, and you’re not guessing what the data’s gonna look like once it’s live

So since we’re handling a ton of data, I think we could really benefit from a more integrated or connected way to manage it all. Like, if there is a way to better track data lineage, metadata, those can help with knowledge transfer.

A couple of months

I haven’t ran into issue yet

I can’t really speak to scalability yet. So far I don’t have any problem with it.

The technical support is good. I'm happy with that.

Positive

We have used something similar before, which was Logstash.

Not sure

I think the pricing for Cribl is reasonable. For large usage, but I heard the calculation of those credits is a bit complicated.

We did, but Cribl just felt more mature and well-established. I think that’s the reason why we selected it.

Cribl gives us way more control and flexibility than we ever had before. We deal with massive volumes of telemetry data, and honestly, a lot of it is just noise. Cribl allow us to easily filter, transform, and route that data exactly how we want. It’s made a big difference.

In my previous organization, I did not get a very good opportunity to explore Cribl. Right now, I am in a different company. I have started to use the tool for my client. I started using Cirbl in my company to leverage Splunk's licenses. We use Cribl to massage the data, trim it, reduce it, and drop any unwanted data. It has been really worth it to have Cribl in our environment to save on Splunk licenses. Also, it is easy to connect the different sources, and you can create the routes. So you can connect from anywhere to anywhere. It is like a connector between the clouds or any kind of source and the Splunk. There are a lot of things, so I am still learning Cribl. Cribl is giving its certifications for free and has not yet started charging people for it. I think it has been seven years since Cribl has come into the boom. I also registered for the next level of courses with Cribl since it is free and is also used widely across companies. Most of the companies are using Cribl right now. After Cisco acquired Splunk, I believe Splunk's licensing costs might increase. People who already have a Splunk environment in their companies or organizations might expect a rise in price because it is merged with Cisco. In the future, Splunk's certification costs will also go high. I think Cribl will come into the picture, and people with Cribl's experience will have good opportunities.

Currently, cyber threats, security threats, and vulnerabilities have become more common. Every day, you see more than two or three vulnerabilities coming out, and every company is thinking about its security. When every organization thinks about its security, it expands its security devices, such as firewalls, EDR devices, or whatever devices are related to security. Companies are expanding their security solutions in their data centers or cloud platforms. What is happening is that because of these security devices, people are unable to ignore any kind of log that is coming into our environment. When you talk about security devices, the amount of data they produce per hour, five minutes, or per day is huge. As the entire world is moving towards cybersecurity to protect their environment, the number of security devices in the environment is also increasing. A lot of logs and huge data are coming into the picture, and companies have to think about every log. They don't have or are not able to ignore any log, so when this is the case, companies might have 10 TB or 10 GB per day invested into Splunk. In the future, if you want to secure your environment and you are installing security devices, you will have a burst of logs. If you have to purchase 30 TB of license with Splunk, but in Cribl, everything can be managed within 15 TB of license or 20 TB of license. I can leverage all the security logs talking to the security teams that can be ignored and even the ones that cannot be ignored.

As of now, there are some environments where some organizations are still on legacy infrastructure, so they are still in virtual environments and are using old versions of devices. Some companies bought Splunk, while others bought Cribl for a very low-priced license. There are some protocols to connect from Cribl to Splunk. I understand Cribl has come into the market very recently, but the tool might have had a picture in its mind where organizations might also have some legacy infrastructure. In the future, with our protocols or our level of architecture, Cribl should not come and say that it is not compatible with them. If Cribl is the reason because I have to change my environment, then I will have to end up investing more.

There are some organizations where the end machines have forwarders that forward the data to Cribl, and from it, the data is forwarded to Splunk. This is how general architecture works. There are two methods of connection between Cribl and Splunk. One is the S2S protocol, which collects logs from Cribl or sends data between Cribl and Splunk. There is another method called HTTP Event Collector (HEC) and HTTPS protocol. With Cribl, connecting to Splunk mostly uses the S2S protocol. The tool supports all the latest devices and platform devices, like all the latest operating systems. There are some organizations where there is legacy infrastructure or if they are still on the old platforms. Companies using old platforms have to consider HTTP Event Collector (HEC), and then they have to change their infrastructure setup in order to fulfill that setup. In order to have Google and Splunk set up in my organization, if I have to change my existing infrastructure connectivity or setup, that might incur more cost or more investment for me to have Cribl and Splunk. Cribl should provide compatibility, or else the tool's developers should speak to the people of such organizations and understand the challenges. Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility.

I have been using Cribl for two years. I am a user of the tool.

I think it is a stable product. According to my observations, people who have five to six years of experience can add more value. However, you will have bugs in any product. You will never know what happens. I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I never got the chance to contact the solution's technical support, but my counterpart, who is a direct employee in the company, had contacted Cribl's support team, and it seems we get pretty good support.

I never used anything before Cribl.

When it comes to the product's installation phase, it is not tough for people who have good knowledge. I would like to highlight a similarity between Splunk and Cribl. Their official site's documentation makes even a layman's job easy. Just following the documentation, they can install the tool, but they still have to do it under some supervision.

The solution is deployed on the cloud and on an on-premises model. When you talk to the tool's global support, you can have the cloud version provided as a SaaS solution, or you can also have an enterprise-level version where you can have it in your own environment. If you have your own data center setup, you can buy Cribl's enterprise version, and you can install it, so it all depends on the requirements.

The tool is worth the investment.

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. It would be good if people get into that data analytics area and understand the usage of Cribl and use it wisely. I wouldn't say it is a cheap product or it is of a higher price. I would say it is really a helpful tool for any mid-level company.

I am not really sure if there are any competitors to Cribl at the moment. I would say Cribl had used its marketing strategy in a better way to advertise its brand than its competitors, and maybe that is why every company thought about it more. I did not see that much advertisement from Datadog. Most of the people still don't know about Datadog.

Datadog is famous for application performance monitoring. I would disagree with those who use it to reduce their costs, as most people would prefer to use Cribl. Cribl's major agenda is to reduce the need for Splunk licenses.

In my company, Splunk’s team uses Cribl to reduce its current number of licenses. My client does not have a very big IT infrastructure, so they have a very small infrastructure, and that may be why more people are not using it. In my previous organization, there were a lot of people who were using Cribl, where they could log their data easily.

If your organization has a lot of security data and wants to expand cybersecurity to protect your organization, and if you are using Splunk and want to reduce Splunk licenses, as Splunk has been in the market for a longer time, I recommend using Cribl. Cribl is also expanding its technology into observability and can also show dashboards or do some data analytics like that. If you talk about expenditures or investments, like if a company has a lot of money to invest, then it is okay. If a company has a very low budget, then it is good to start off with Cribl for data analytics.

For beginners, Cribl would be a tough subject because before using the tool, they need to understand the cloud, AWS, and the different data sources. Beginners won't understand what AWS or S3 is, why they need to connect them both, why they have to reduce the logs, or what the use of logs is. Cribl can be a tough subject for a person or a fresher who just passed out of college. It also depends on the background of the person using the tool. For example, if someone has taken computer networks as a major subject or has a specialization in networks, cloud management, or cloud computing, using Cribl would be a cakewalk.

You totally need to understand why you need Cribl, and so it all depends on your requirements. If my requirement is to work on log analytics, I would rate Cribl a nine out of ten. If my company is not much worried about the data analytics concept, then I would not use Cribl. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We were one of the first customers when Cribl launched. Around 10% to 20% of Cribl had already been implemented when I joined. My role involved expanding it to 100% of our incoming logs being processed through Cribl. Our primary use case was to collect logs from various cloud sources. We also planned to migrate and optimize our usage, as we now handle a significant volume, about 15 TB, with enterprise licensing.

Cribl played a crucial role in reducing costs and improving efficiency, though we’re still fully realizing those benefits. We have now implemented Cribl as our primary log collection endpoint. We use it alongside Splunk, aiming to reduce licensing costs while taking advantage of Cribl's streamlined log collection features.

Once Cribl is fully integrated, we plan to segregate data—moving less critical logs, like test and non-production logs, to open-source solutions to further reduce licensing costs. In our hybrid environment, with enterprise and open-source tools, Cribl has simplified the process. We've successfully used it to migrate our enterprise logs to the cloud, and this migration is ongoing. Cribl has been instrumental in ensuring that these changes do not disrupt our production systems and has made the migration between different log management tools, including Splunk and others like Microsoft Sentinel or Datadog, much smoother.

One of the main benefits is the simplified log collection from multiple sources. Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source. We can test by passing sample logs without needing a separate test environment, unlike in Splunk, where onboarding data requires a non-prod environment and multiple validations before moving to production. Cribl significantly reduces the time required by allowing us to upload samples, perform parsing and field extractions, and commit directly to production.

Cribl has simplified many aspects of the onboarding process, but there's still room for improvement. Currently, no other tools in the market truly compete with Cribl in its niche. Splunk is trying to retain customers by developing ingest actions to reduce licensing costs, hoping to prevent them from switching to Cribl.

There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status.

Since Cribl plays a major role in the mid-layer between the source and destination, there's a slight risk of losing data at some points while receiving real time data.

It would be helpful if Cribl could temporarily store or index the data for a specific time range. This would prevent data loss during downtime. Additionally, there's room for improvement in how Cribl handles historical data. Currently, I can't view trends beyond a week, and even then, it’s often limited to just 24 hours. Since Cribl doesn’t index the data but only forwards it, extending the period for viewing statistics and monitoring trends would be a valuable enhancement.

I have been using Cribl for around two and a half years. We are using V4.1.2 of the solution.

We've encountered some minor bugs, particularly in data parsing. However, these were quickly addressed in the next version. It is a stable product with ongoing development that reflects steady improvement.

Ten members use this solution from both on-site and off-site.

The support we've received over the last two years has been good. Whenever I've raised a case, they've addressed it based on the priority level and have been consistently supportive.

Positive

Cribl can collect data from any source straightforwardly without disrupting the existing logging setup—minor changes are needed to point the logs to Cribl. One of the main reasons we adopted Cribl was to reduce our Splunk licensing costs, which has been very effective. The cost savings from using Cribl versus the reduced licensing fees for our enterprise setup are significant.

In the first implementation phase, we saw noticeable results in reduced licensing costs. As management pushed for further cost savings by incorporating open-source solutions, Cribl was crucial in ensuring a smooth transition. Whether migrating from one tool to another, splitting, or moving from enterprise to cloud, Cribl has made these transitions seamless.

The initial setup with Cribl is much easier. Upgrading versions, especially in cloud environments, is almost a single-click process. Upgrading is also straightforward for on-premises setups—updating the leader node automatically distributes the upgrade to all worker groups and nodes. This makes upgrading, maintaining, and installing Cribl relatively simple compared to other tools.

Additionally, Cribl offers free training for users and administrators. The existing learning materials are comprehensive enough to support effective use and deployment.

Compared to other enterprise solutions, Cribl tends to be more cost-effective. While other major players can be quite expensive, especially as data volumes increase over time, Cribl offers a fair pricing model. As organizations continue to generate larger amounts of data daily, it's important for large enterprise solutions to reconsider their pricing structures and potentially offer better deals for larger data needs. Cribl is not the cheapest option but provides good value, given its scalability and efficiency.

The first thing to consider is the amount of data you're dealing with. Cribl is particularly beneficial for large-scale data environments. It allows you to process and store data efficiently, similar to how Splunk uses summary indexes. For example, when pulling raw events into Splunk, we often extract relevant logs using data models to simplify the data. Cribl enables a similar approach by letting you directly parse and filter data. If you have a raw event with hundreds of fields but only need 40% of those for day-to-day operations, Cribl lets you create multiple pipelines to extract the necessary data for your enterprise and production servers.

At the same time, you can save a complete copy of the raw events in data lakes or local storage without affecting daily operations. If a security incident arises and the extracted fields don’t provide enough information, Cribl’s replay feature allows you to retrieve and analyze the raw data for a specific time range. This capability is handy when handling terabytes of data per day. When someone asks if Cribl is right for their needs, my first question is about the size of the data they're dealing with.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I am using Cribl to have everything centralized in one tool in terms of data collection. We were working with different Splunk customers, and Cribl helps collect data and then send it to an S3 bucket or Amazon Web Services (AWS) response plan.

Cribl allows us to enforce security for some customers. For instance, if they want to add fields, values, or need to change formats to comply with different security standards, Cribl makes it possible.

My favorite option in Cribl is the Stream product. It is the best use case for us and our customers. Additionally, the community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.

At the moment, I don't have specific feedback on what can be improved as I do not work with Cribl daily. Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.

I have been using Cribl for about two years, more or less.

From my experience, I did not face issues with Cribl's stability. However, I heard others have faced issues.

In my experience, Cribl has been perfect in terms of scalability. I did not have any issues.

I haven't contacted them in terms of paid support. That said, the community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.

Positive

The initial setup is really straightforward, and the documentation is very good.

I am not aware of the pricing details, however, I know they use a credit format for billing.

Utilize the documentation to ensure Cribl fits your use case, and join the Cribl community for any questions or recommendations.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.