When Cribl announced its monster $200M financing round, we wondered what is coming next for the observability infrastructure company. The company has revealed some of what got investors excited in its fall release (Version 3.2.0) announcements. We think the two most important elements of the fall release announcements include is Cloud Visibility & Management and its Quick Connect features, both of which enhance Cribl customers’ implementation of the flagship product, LogStream.
In addition to this 3.2.0 release, we think another reason investors are so enthusiastic to back Cribl is the growing demand for observability systems. We expect that, over time, the networking, security, and observability industries will see increasing overlap between each other. This overlap will drive customers to demand solid third-party alternatives to the trend where prominent players from each of the three industries acquire smaller, best-of-breed category leaders. While there is able competition in the overall Observability market, Cribl’s newfound war chest positions it to vie for leadership in the emerging observability infrastructure market.
The company’s main fall release enhancements include:
- Quick Connect – connect sources to destinations with a simple, drag-and-drop interface without the need to create filters. We see Quick Connect as a GUI that reduces the time to route data between source(s) and destination(s). Cribl’s “Pack” concept, which is a pre-configured package of functions sourced from Cribl and/or its community members, can also be easily applied with a few clicks.
- Cloud Visibility and Management – Central management for multiple LogStream systems from the Cloud, providing a single pane of management, data processing, and billing. We see this capability as akin to cloud-management of data networking devices like WLAN Access Points in that it allows you to keep the management plan separate from the data, and keep the data processing close to the egress point data separate from the management plane.
- GitOps Workflows – the company allows you to pull and push updates from the production version of Logstream. The GitOps Workflows function allows you to develop, test and deploy more efficiently using the Git concept.
- OpenTelemetry Support. Support for OpenTelemetry, which is an open-source and free collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that is in beta and should get to general availability soon. Logstream is ahead of the industry in its support.
- Integrations – Logstream will soon support Crowdstrike, O365 Teams, DataDog, New Relic Ingest
The Cloud Visibility and Management function is essential because it contemplates two realities: (a) the need to centrally manage multiple LogStream systems simultaneously, and (b) the increasing need to ensure data flows through and is stored, in the places specified by the customer. The first, central management, the function should be an obvious enhancement to LogStream, for many reasons, including that most software systems are moving to the Cloud. As customers deploy LogStream more widely, managing them gets easier with central management.
The second important function of Cloud Visibility and Management is that it:
- allows customers to comply with government mandates for data usage and storage,
- enables customers to more ably address privacy and security concerns
- empowers organizations either to move to the Cloud, maintain premises-based locations, or permutations of both, depending on various factors including cost and corporate “cloudification” objectives
Quick Connect simplifies setting up LogStream and is especially appropriate for improving the set-up experience when first using the system. We see this as a wizard that makes it easier and faster to set up LogStream. In early customer usage of this feature, it sees it most often used for fast onboarding for data routing. We’d expect this to remain the case for customers who implement the 3.2.0 release.