On the heels of AWS re:Invent, the Cribl team found itself back in Vegas for Gartner’s Infrastructure Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference. Again held at the Venetian, over 3500 attendees gathered to listen to the latest research and insights from analysts. If you haven’t attended before, this is one of Gartner’s most wide-ranging events, covering everything from integrating the edge, to cost optimization, to sustainability, and security.

Each of these were hot topics with the several hundred attendees that stopped by the Cribl booth. We covered cost optimization and avoidance in their logging and observability spend, as well as how to improve cybersecurity visibility across their organizations. Cloud transitions, multi-cloud management and hybrid data management were also frequent topics, and the Cribl team walked a number of senior IT leaders through demos of Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge.

One of the cool things about speaking with IT leaders is watching the light come on when they grasp what having choice and control over observability data means for their business. These aren’t people worried about speeds and feeds. Instead, things like staffing, staying within budget, and governing the flood of data keep them up at night. Once it clicks with them, they become advocates for what Cribl can do. My favorite attendee walked up to the booth and stated, “I need you to start cribling my data.” What company doesn’t want its name to be a verb?

We also gave away our entire herd of plushie goats. Don’t be sad for them. They’re all off to good homes.

The event also had a large contingent of attendees from the federal space. Many of these IT leaders are concerned with complying with the cybersecurity executive order, specifically the federal logging maturity model. Even things as trivial as normalizing timestamps become insurmountable when dealing with dozens or hundreds of log formats and sources. With Cribl Stream, that’s a breeze.

Another topic was data sharing. How can one federal agency readily share data with another, when the data is locked into proprietary data storage? This is where Cribl Stream’s Replay feature comes in. With that, you can replay data from low-cost object storage to any destination, even a destination located in another agency.

Lastly, despite the spate of news headlines proclaiming a looming recession, the mood at the show was buoyant. Attendees were looking to maximize their upside, rather than simply minimizing potential impending downsides. This is another advantage of speaking to senior IT leaders: they’ve seen downturns before, and they’re always planning 18-24 months out. They jump into big-tent discussions around vendor consolidation, cost optimization, and technology force multipliers for their overworked teams.

The Cribl team had a great time in Las Vegas. We look forward to seeing everyone there next year.