VMblog recently reached out to Clint Sharp, the CEO and Co-founder of Cribl, a company leading the efforts in open observability.  Most recently, they unveiled Cribl Edge, a next-generation agent that allows organizations to auto-discover and centrally control mission-critical telemetry data for incorporation into analytics systems.

We wanted to learn more about the company and its solutions, how they solve some of today's challenges, and also find out more about what's coming down the road.

VMblog:  What does Cribl do and what sets it apart from other companies in the space?

Clint Sharp:  Cribl works to make open observability a reality for today's tech professionals. The observability space is red hot, with Citi analysts estimating the market opportunity could reach $55B by 2025. We've all heard the mantra "data is the new oil" a million times in the last year. CIOs all over the world have been given the mandate to make their companies "data-driven." The issue is that the current data ecosystem - just like many sectors of the tech industry - is built around a culture of lock-in. Not only does that create cost barriers and complexity for customers, it limits an organization's ability to truly unlock all that observability data has to offer. 

At Cribl, we believe in the value of a diverse, open ecosystem of data. Customers need a platform that is open, interoperable, and works with enterprises' existing toolsets and investments. Our product suite focuses on providing customers unprecedented levels of choice and control. We believe customers should be able to make choices rather than compromises in regards to their data.

VMblog:  What is observability, and why is it important?

Sharp:  Observability is the ability to ask and answer questions of complex systems, allowing you to understand the behavior of applications and infrastructure from the data they produce. This differs from traditional "monitoring," which allows you to watch your systems, track performance, identify anomalies, and view overall system health. Monitoring is for the things you already know you want to track, but knowing what you want to track isn't always possible in today's distributed environments. This is where observability comes in. Observability allows you to explore data and uncover insights from decentralized applications, servers, network devices, and cybersecurity tools. This gives operations and security teams unprecedented visibility into what's happening in increasingly complex infrastructure and cybersecurity environments. 

VMblog:  What are the practitioner pain points you're out to solve?

Sharp:  The greatest challenge enterprises face is a deluge of observability data for both IT and security teams, and most lack the infrastructure to handle it and the ability to manage data collection at scale. Worldwide, data growth is increasing at a 23% CAGR, per IDC. As a result, businesses are struggling with the cost of observability and security data, many spending millions a year, some into the tens of millions a year, to store their metrics, logs, and traces. A new architecture is needed to help organizations regain control over data volume and data gravity.

VMblog:  What does Cribl's current product portfolio consist of?

Sharp:  Cribl Stream, our flagship product, is a vendor-agnostic observability pipeline that helps users process machine data in real time and deliver it to the analysis platforms of choice. Stream sits between the sources and destinations of observability data and allows users to route, filter, enrich, and redact data. It also allows users to replay data from low cost object storage. With Stream, practitioners can control their data and send it to the proper teams and tools while giving them the flexibility to instrument everything, analyze more, and pay less.

Cribl Edge, our most recent product addition, is an observability agent that allows teams to collect and process observability data in real time and deliver them to Cribl Stream or any supported destination. Cribl Edge lets teams dive into data before deciding to collect and process it while also reducing, transforming, and routing data at the edge for more flexibility.

Cribl.Cloud is a fast alternative to downloading and self-hosting Stream and Edge software where we assume responsibility for managing the infrastructure.

AppScope, available to the open source community, provides operations teams with the ability to add dynamic instrumentation to applications at runtime, diagnose performance problems, observe application behavior, and collect instrumentation data as events and metrics, all without needing to recompile code.

VMblog:  Why is edge an important part of observability?

Sharp:  The edge is important to observability for two reasons. First, the edge is where we see the most data being generated. It's flowing from containers, microservices, instrumented applications, and a variety of other systems and services. Edge data is vital to expanding the observable footprint for operations and cybersecurity teams, but that creates enormous pressure for how that data is collected, managed, and used. That takes me to the second reason. The old model of moving data before you can do anything with it is costly, resource intensive, and largely wasteful. Today, if I want to explore or analyze logs, metrics, and traces, I have to ship that data from the edge to some centralized platform where it is classified and indexed. If you want true observability, you must be able to use data directly from the edge, without requiring it to be moved.

VMblog:  Observability is a growing space. What are your predictions for the field and its adoption?

Sharp:  Though momentum in the observability space is certainly picking up, it's still relatively nascent. There's more educational work that needs to be done so that more organizations can understand the power of observability and realize that it's accessible and useful to companies of all sizes. Over this next year, I expect the conversation around observability will become more nuanced and sophisticated, and it will elevate to a C-suite level priority as leaders begin to see its true business value.

One specific concept that we believe will be a core component of the future of observability is an idea we recently introduced called the "observability lake." The observability lake provides an open, queryable, vendor-neutral place to store data in open formats, cheaply. In today's world, analyzing observability and security data at rest requires one or more commercial tools or SaaS services. Once you put data into your logging, metrics, and tracing tools and services, this data is no longer your data - it is the vendor's data. Reading that data back requires maintaining a commercial relationship with your vendor, often with little leverage or control over the cost. The observability lake frees you from this lock-in and ensures the enterprise's data always remains the enterprise's data. More to come from us on this topic in coming months!

VMblog:  Finally, what are Cribl's plans for the future? Where do you see the company in five years?

Sharp:  We experienced incredible growth in FY21. We raised $202 million in Series C in August, tripled our customer base, increased average deal size by nearly 50% YoY, achieved 300% increase in ARR, and expanded our team by 300%. We've seen great traction and interest from customers, partners, and investors, in large part because of our differentiated approach to open observability. Moving forward, we want to continue this momentum and continue to build out a full, innovative suite of observability solutions that offers businesses' radical choice and control over all observability data.

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