There is an immense amount of IT and security data out there and there’s no sign of slowing down. Our customers have told us they feel like they’re drowning in data. They know some data have value, some don’t. Some might have value in the future. They need some place cost-effective to store it all. Some for just a short while, some for the long haul. But they’re not data engineers. They don’t have the expertise to set up and maintain a traditional data lake. Nor do they have the budget to hire. Object stores have been a decent alternative. But when they try to access and move data to analysis tools, they’re faced with delays and frustrations.

When these challenges were echoed across several of our customers, we felt compelled to do something. True to Cribl’s mission, we focused on building a product that would be complementary to existing stacks. Something simple and easy to use. A solution to optimize how data is stored, managed, and accessed…

…and that, my friends, is how Cribl Lake was born. (and we hope its first words are dada data 😉 )

Initial discussions about what an ideal data lake solution would look like included a few non-negotiables:

• Super fast, super simple setup and management
• Easy access to data
• Store in open formats
• Schema-on-need approach
• Automated security and policy controls
• Ability to run queries without having to move or rehydrate data

Our end goal was simple. We want to help our customers onboard huge volumes of data and give them easy access to replay, search, and analyze their data.

The Cribl Solution: Introducing Cribl Lake

To say we are excited to introduce our new data lake to the world is a severe understatement. We are thrilled. STOKED! Eager and enthusiastic (!!!) to expand our data management strategy with the addition of Cribl Lake, arming IT and security teams with the simplicity and flexibility they need to take control of their exploding data volumes.

Cribl Lake is a turnkey data lake solution that makes it easy to store, manage, access, replay, and search data. No data or cloud expertise needed. Cribl Lake leverages open formats — no pre-defined schema required, unifies security with rich access controls, and centralizes access to all IT and security data. Cribl handles the heavy lifting so data can be valuable to the teams and tools that need it.

Cribl Lake is available as:

1. A fully hosted, Cribl-managed data lake where you can store your data and let Cribl manage it all for you.
2. BYOS (bring your own storage) allows you to store your data where you want, and use Cribl Lake as a turnkey solution to simplify integrations with Cribl Stream, Edge, and Search – this feature will be available come summertime.

With Cribl Lake, you can:

• Store any type of IT and security data — logs, metrics, or distributed traces, regardless of whether that data is unstructured, semi-structured, or fully structured. Cribl Lake doesn’t care!
• Optimize for future value through schema-on-need, store in any format and reformat when needed.
• Easily access data through open formats to simplify future analysis and replay operations. No proprietary schema or vendor lock-in.
• Maintain security and compliance with unified security features, retention policies, authentication features, and access controls.
• Reduce storage costs with comprehensive tiered storage based on data value.

How Cribl Lake Brings the Cribl Portfolio Together

Cribl Lake seamlessly integrates with Cribl’s suite of products. Cribl’s unified platform empowers data to be managed efficiently, from ingestion to long-term storage.

Powerful data collection and replay with Cribl Stream and Edge

Cribl Stream and Edge allow data to be ingested from disparate sources. Data is delivered to Cribl Lake, where it’s stored in open formats, making for easy access. Data can be transformed, enriched, replayed, and routed downstream in any format, to any tool, at any time.

Faster, large-scale analysis with Cribl Search

Most analytics solutions today need you to move data into them to query it. They’re not designed to query data natively in place, like in data lakes. Which adds friction and inefficiency to the process, not to mention cost. Cribl Lake unlocks Cribl Search in a powerful way — giving a cost-effective solution for dealing with the huge amounts of data that may have unclear immediate value.

Cribl Search unifies the query experience no matter where data is stored. There’s no need to move or rehydrate data. Data can be queried at rest, in and across Cribl Lake, all data lakes, object stores, search APIs, and analytics solutions like OpenSearch. Federated search allows you to query not just one set of data but multiple data stores and sources, simultaneously. This means you can run fast investigations and get value from data without delays.

Cribl Lake rounds out Cribl’s product portfolio and allows a schema-on-need approach that gives the flexibility, choice, and control to help solve your toughest IT and security data challenges.

The Benefits: Speed, Ease, and Choice

Expanding on our initial non-negotiables, we designed Cribl Lake to deliver speed, ease, and choice to our customers:

Speed: Fast-track your data lake strategy

Minutes, not months to get up and running with a managed data lake. Zero configuration needed with automated provisioning that creates a fully usable cloud data lake in minutes, instead of weeks or months. Out-of-the-box integrations streamline workflows to ingest, store, route, replay, and search data.

Ease: Easy in, easy out

Take the complexity out of managing data. No cloud or data-specific skills required. Remove the possibility of human error with unified retention, security, and access control policies across object stores and clouds. Keep data safe, prevent unauthorized access, and ease data sharing across the enterprise. Cribl Lake seamlessly scales as your data needs grow.

Schema-on-need: Data in the format you need, when you need it.

Not all data is created equal. Simplify data onboarding by storing data in its original format or enrich it with additional details to provide more insight via Search. The power of Lake + Stream is being able to transform or enrich data with Replay to fit downstream tools or use cases, as required. Only transform data to a particular schema when you need to.

Choice: Store data where it makes sense

Bring Your Own Storage or use Cribl-managed storage. Use Cribl Lake as a unified management layer with your own storage — Amazon S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, etc. — giving you choice to store data where you need it and to complement and optimize your existing lake strategy. Or, let Cribl manage it all for you. Either way, you get one unified platform to manage data across the entire enterprise.

No vendor lock-in. Ever. Whether you use your storage or ours, you never have to worry about your data being locked in. Cribl Lake stores data in open formats, no pre-defining schema necessary. Data can have any schema, and be in any format — making data accessible, searchable, usable, and valuable to the tools and teams that need it.

Reduce costs with tiered storage based on data value. Send high-value, highly accessed data downstream to store in tools like SIEM and APMs. And keep infrequently accessed and low-value data in Cribl Lake for long-term retention.

Future-proof your data strategy with Cribl

There’s a multitude of ways Cribl’s scalability and search functionality can help you analyze large datasets more effectively. This translates to faster time to insights, allowing you to identify and resolve incidents quicker, and ensuring continuous regulatory compliance.

Store your data where it makes sense and use Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, to future-proof your data management strategy. Cribl Lake prepares future-you for when you need to store more data types, use more analysis tools, and have more flexibility and control when it comes to unlocking the value of all your data.

Take the plunge, try Cribl Lake today!

To get started with Cribl Lake, sign up for Cribl.Cloud and enjoy 50GB of free storage.

To learn more about Cribl Lake and to see a demo, register for our upcoming webinar: 3 Ways to Fast-Track your Data Lake Strategy, Without Being a Data Expert — Wednesday, April 24 at 10am PT | 1pm ET. Here’s to smooth sailing and plenty of fish data insights!

**A boatload of gratitude and thanks to the incredible folks behind Cribl Lake. Your dedication, and hard work brought this baby to life. Fo-shore the best team around!