Cribl

Profile

Cribl is a vendor-agnostic telemetry platform that provides granular control over the collection, processing, routing, storage, and investigation of machine data—specifically metrics, logs, and traces—generated by modern IT and security infrastructures. The platform comprises four primary products: Cribl Stream (observability pipeline), Cribl Edge (unified endpoint collection), Cribl Search (in-place query capabilities), and Cribl Lake (cloud data lake storage). Cribl addresses challenges of data volume, heterogeneity, cost, and vendor lock-in by decoupling data sources from analytical destinations, enabling intelligent data reduction and enrichment across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. The platform operates under a commercial subscription and usage-based licensing model, with a free tier supporting up to 1TB/day processing.

Focus

Cribl solves the fundamental challenge of telemetry scale, complexity, and cost in environments where heterogeneous data sources must feed multiple observability and security platforms. Organizations face escalating costs from volume-based ingestion pricing, operational complexity from fragmented collection mechanisms, and vendor lock-in from tool-specific data formats. Cribl's observability pipeline architecture enables consistent filtering, sampling, aggregation, and transformation across diverse telemetry streams, reducing downstream costs while maintaining analytical value. The platform serves IT operations teams, security operations centers, site reliability engineers, and DevOps practitioners who require flexible, economical telemetry management across SIEMs, log analytics platforms, monitoring tools, and data lakes without monolithic vendor dependence or duplicated collection infrastructure.

Background

Cribl operates as a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco, led by CEO and Co-Founder Clint Sharp. The company has secured over $600 million in venture funding, including a Series E round led by GV (Google Ventures) that valued the company at $3.5 billion. Cribl achieved over $100 million in annual recurring revenue within four years of operation, becoming one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies. The platform is actively maintained with documented release notes for Stream, Edge, and Search products, and governance is exercised through a corporate board structure with institutional investor representation. Cribl's Product Security Team manages open-source dependencies and vulnerabilities, while the company maintains formal support channels and a vulnerability disclosure program.

Main features

Schema-agnostic observability pipeline

Cribl Stream functions as a stream processing engine that unifies collection and processing of metrics, logs, and traces, routing data to any observability tool without assuming fixed schemas or formats. The pipeline can parse, transform, and manipulate telemetry in native forms—JSON, key-value messages, structured cloud logs, or unstructured text—enabling workflows such as extracting specific fields for indexing, masking sensitive data for compliance, and aggregating fine-grained events into volume-reducing summaries. Stream supports filtering to drop noisy events, sampling for representative subsets, enrichment with contextual information from external sources, and simultaneous routing to multiple destinations with different schemas, effectively serving as a universal adapter between heterogeneous sources and analytical systems.

Unified endpoint telemetry collection

Cribl Edge provides vendor-neutral agent capabilities for collecting telemetry across Windows, Linux, macOS, and Kubernetes environments, managed centrally through a GUI. Edge automatically discovers and collects data from diverse endpoints, delivering telemetry to Cribl Stream via open protocols—specifically Cribl HTTP over port 10200—for zero-cost internal pipeline flows. The agent supports file monitoring, Kubernetes event collection, and Prometheus metrics enrichment, with configuration workflows that start at Stream's receiving end, then define Edge destinations and sources labeled with tags for routing. Edge eliminates the need for multiple vendor-specific agents, enabling organizations to collect telemetry exactly once and apply filtering, aggregation, and transformation centrally rather than at each endpoint.

In-place data lake search and storage

Cribl Search enables querying telemetry stored across object stores, data lakes, and archives without moving or rehydrating data, reducing friction in investigative workflows where logs are scattered across multiple storage tiers. Cribl Lake provides turnkey cloud data lake storage optimized for replay and analysis, with pricing differentiated between Cribl-managed lakes and self-managed storage (BYOS). Stream can route reduced telemetry to high-cost operational tools while sending full-fidelity data to Lake for extended retention at lower cost, supporting forensic investigations and compliance requirements. Direct Access ingest allows administrators to bypass Stream's processing when only storage and query capabilities are needed, with Lake handling compressed data volumes and Search providing federated query capabilities across distributed repositories.