Cribl.Cloud Simplified with Consumption Pricing

One year ago, we launched Cribl.Cloud as a cloud-hosted option for our industry-leading data pipeline product, Cribl Stream. Customers had a choice of either deploying on-premises with a subscription-based tiered license model or opting for our cloud service with a similar tiered billing model.

Fast-forward one year, and Cribl is now a multi-product company with several unique observability products (Stream, Edge, AppScope, and soon Search) to offer our customers. With this maturation, our customers started asking us to make it simpler to consume our various services end-to-end. Cribl listens to our customers! So we’ve launched a new pricing and licensing model to simplify consumption.

What is Consumption Pricing, and Why Does It Matter?

We’ve moved from tiered pricing to consumption-based pricing to simplify licensing and pricing. In tiered pricing, you buy into a particular service at a specific tier and consume at that tier. Every tier has a discount level, which typically increases with higher tiers.

On the other hand, consumption pricing allows customers to use any service at any volume and pay only for what they use – without being bound to a particular tier or service.

The schematic below provides a high-level view of the differences. Cribl’s on-prem model mostly follows tiered pricing, where you install and license the software based on tiered usage. This is like the pinball machine on the left, where you buy the hardware (you provide the infrastructure) and are licensed to play only that pinball machine.

Cribl.Cloud’s prior model was like the game coin in the middle, where you purchased the game coin for a particular game, and rented the game. In this case, you didn’t have to buy the pinball machine. You just rented it and played by inserting coins. From a cloud service perspective, you didn’t need to buy software, you could use the software running in the cloud under similar tiered licensing boundaries, but you could still only use that one service.

Our new consumption-based pricing is like the power card on the right, and you can play any game in the arcade by purchasing and presenting your power card. You just pay each game’s value to play it. In Crib.Cloud, a game will be equivalent to a service.

Let’s consider the following example of a cloud vendor called “ACME Cloud” with access to a few services in the two pricing models. “Tiered pricing” would look something like this:

In this model, a customer would purchase one or more service(s) in a particular tier, and they are bound to that tier. If their consumption requirements change, they would need to renegotiate the contract, and that takes time and process.

“Consumption pricing” would look something like this:

In this model, a customer is free to use any of the ACME services. They are charged for how much of the service(s) they use, at a fixed price that’s irrespective of volume. This example shows how consumption-based pricing provides the flexibility and simplicity of using cloud services without lengthy contract renegotiation.

Cribl.Cloud Consumption Pricing Explained

Cribl’s consumption pricing works off a concept of virtual transaction currency called Cribl.Cloud Credit. Think of these credits as your virtual power card (a.k.a., credit pool), which gets drawn down upon as you consume services.

The credit pool is primed with credits like this:

1. Customers purchase X number of credits for a term (1yr, 2yrs, etc.), and these get put into their credit pool. Customers pay a negotiated price of ‘Y’ USD for the credits.
2. Credits can also be added to the pool from SLA events, marketing promotions, etc.
3. You can purchase more credits to replenish the credit pool at any time.

Cribl.Cloud today has two main licensing tiers, Enterprise and Standard. These differ in features (e.g., Hybrid worker support is available only in Enterprise; for a complete list of differences, please click here) and cost for data throughput, as shown below.

A quick note on hybrid deployment: Cribl.Cloud Enterprise divides into two price tiers because it allows for two deployment modes, as shown in the diagram below.

The Cloud Leader and the Cloud Workers are hosted by Cribl and managed by Cribl. There is nothing for the customer to host or manage for these. When data is required to reside within a customer’s data center, customers have the flexibility to install hybrid Workers. These are installed and managed by customers on-premises or customer-managed cloud resources, but they will be controlled via the same Cloud Leader.

The control plane, a.k.a. “Leader,” is the same for both Stream and Edge. The data plane, a.k.a. “Workers” for Stream, can be in the cloud or on-premises (Hybrid). The Workers for Edge, however, are at the source of the data or the Edge points of presence – typically on-premises. Edge Workers (installed and managed by the customer) are similar to the Enterprise hybrid workers from a pricing point of view.

Pricing Example: Customer Joe’s Pizza has a requirement for a 1-yr Enterprise subscription to Cribl.Cloud, and plans to use both the Stream and Edge products.

The only step is to identify how many Cribl.Cloud credits Joe’s Pizza needs. For this, identify the approximate volume of data that will be ingested by Stream and Edge in that year and calculate a corresponding number of required credits. E.g.:

• Cribl Stream cloud worker data ingested for the year – 365 TB
• Cribl Stream hybrid worker data ingested for the year – 200 TB
• Cribl Edge Worker data ingested for the year – 150 TB

Total number of credits = (365 TB * 0.35) + (200 TB * 0.28) + (150 TB * 0.28) = 231,168 cloud credits. Their Cribl sales associate can help them price these credits for their subscription.

Joe’s Pizza will need to purchase 231,168 cloud credits to support the cloud usage. The above ingestion volume is just an approximation to get their credit pool primed. At any time during their subscription, they can change their usage volumes, change their services used, or buy more credits as needed.

Credit Usage Monitoring

Customers can monitor their credit pool and consumption in detail via Cribl.Cloud portal’s Organization tab, as shown below. You can see the plan, total credits usage, and monthly usage breakdown.

Do Cribl.Cloud Credits Expire?

Basically, no! Cribl.Cloud credits provide flexibility of usage during the subscription. Any remaining credits in the pool at the end of a subscription will roll over to a new subscription upon renewal. In the renewed subscription, the rolled-over credits will be drawn down before any new credits you’ve purchased as part of the renewal. However, if a subscription is not renewed, any remaining credits will expire when the subscription ends.

Summary

To sum up, consumption pricing gives you your ‘power card’ to Cribl.Cloud services. It provides a simple and transparent path with the flexibility to consume any of our cloud-based services in any desired volume through a combined subscription. We hope you like these new options! For more information, please see the Cribl pricing page or contact your Cribl sales representative.