Edge + AppScope: Unlocking New Insights You Didn’t Know Existed Was Never This Easy!

The moment has finally arrived!

“Yes! I do”

“Yes! I do”

With great joy, I now introduce to you the newly married Edge and AppScope!

Beginning the journey of a lifetime, let’s give it up for this power couple! Together they offer auto-discovery, central management, high scalability, high-fidelity data collection, and rich observability.

via GIPHY

Now that the ceremony, dancing, and dinner (burp!) are over, let me tell you why the Cribl Edge and AppScope integration is a game-changer.

AppScope is Cribl’s open-source, instrumentation on-demand utility for any Linux command, process or application. It helps users explore, understand, gain visibility and collect high-fidelity data with no code modification. While Cribl Edge, the intelligent agent and other half, gathers and auto-discovers observability data at its source. What does this felicitous union mean for you? Let’s dive in.

Why Monitoring Isn’t Just Enough, and Observability Is a Necessity

Operating a service today requires not just monitoring but observing.

What’s the difference?

Well, observing a service requires the collection of high-fidelity application data.

Why?

Because you cannot ask questions of data that you don’t collect or simply don’t know exists.

In today’s digital age of highly distributed but hyper-connected applications, understanding the customer experience through the legacy approaches of monitoring is not enough. Existing monitoring approaches were designed to formulate questions we already knew the answers to.

Here’s an example: the ITOps teams can quickly interrogate the CPU and Memory utilization of a particular server; the questions asked, as well as the answers are predictable enough. But, on the other hand, let’s consider a more complex security scenario. Cybersecurity attacks are ever-increasing, thanks to the pandemic, the rise of remote work, and the proliferation of digital devices.

In the event of an attack, the Security Operations Center (SOC) or the SecOps teams acting on the incident must interrogate and understand the complex behaviors they didn’t anticipate. In addition, the teams are still responsible to mitigate and frame evolving questions in real time. This is a nearly-impossible task for these teams unless they have access to full-fidelity data over a period of time, such as Network Flow logs or DNS requests/responses, etc. Remember, you cannot ask questions of data that you don’t collect or simply don’t know exists!

Enter Cribl Edge 4.0’s integration with AppScope!

Cribl Edge + AppScope takes you toward Observability bliss:

Cribl Edge is part of the Cribl Suite of Products containing Cribl Stream, and Cribl Search(which we also introduced in this Cribl Suite 4.0 release) in addition to Edge. Cribl Edge’s intelligent agent efficiently gathers and auto-discovers observability data at its egress point, the edge, so you can open additional, cost-effective options for data collection and processing. In addition, with Edge’s built-in Fleet Management, you can effortlessly manage tens of thousands of Cribl Edge nodes while lowering data collection TCO and collecting all the data you need, at the edge, at scale.

AppScope aims to give operators the necessary visibility into application behavior, metrics, and events. You can easily and quickly collect data that other tools either can’t crack open or can only show you in a laborious, painstaking kind of way. There’s no need to ask developers to re-instrument code and no need to append sidecars or log shippers. Hooray for legacy applications!

Together, Cribl Edge and AppScope power-couple combo unlock new insights for IT and SecOps teams:

• Collect high-fidelity application data you never collected before, such as Network Flows, DNS Requests and Responses, auditd events etc. Just add scope, on demand, to any Linux binary (or running process!). This will capture the telemetry you need, in open formats, ready to be processed by Cribl Edge locally, or be sent to Cribl Stream for further centralized processing. You can also send the data to your downstream log and metric tools for troubleshooting, alerting, and reporting. Oh my!

• Specify which processes/applications on the host will need to be ‘scoped’, thus offering itself as a light-weight APM tool for collecting similar levels of information as a third-party APM. The best part? It’s out of the box, on-demand, and doesn’t require code instrumentation.

• Search events inside high-fidelity telemetry using Cribl’s newest product, Cribl Search. Search data on Edge nodes collected through AppScope to significantly reduce time to resolutions of concerns.

Today, with the release of Cribl Suite 4.0 (Edge, Stream and Search) and the integration of Cribl Edge with AppScope, we are taking Observability, especially at the edge, to a whole different level. Unlocking new insights and value has never been this easy!

Summary

The Cribl Edge and AppScope integration is but one of the exciting new announcements we have in store for you this Fall. If you’re interested, you can sign up at Cribl.Cloud today, and Cribl Edge is included free up to 1TB of data per day and up to 100 nodes. Take it for a spin and we betcha, you will love it! If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you in our community. Join us to learn more about the newest features in our Cribl suite of products.

If you like to dig deeper, our Cribl Certified Observability Engineer (CCOE) certification program offers free industry-leading observability and security data education and knowledge. It exemplifies one’s commitment to mastering the skills and knowledge required to be a true observability engineer. Create your free Cribl University learner account and start your CCOE certification journey, today.

More on Cribl’s Fall Launch

• Cribl is Redefining Search for Your Observability & Security Data
• What’s New With Cribl Stream 4.0?
• What’s New With Cribl Edge 4.0?
• Cribl’s New User Interface
• What’s New With Cribl.Cloud 4.0?
• The Stream Life Episode 66: Cribl Search is Here!