It’s been a busy Winter at Cribl!

Today we are officially announcing Cribl Edge, a next-generation agent that expands the scope of observability. In Edge, we’ve taken the very concept of “agent” and given it a Cribl power-up by taking our best-in-class observability pipeline technology built into Cribl Stream and moving it all the way out to edge systems. We extend our simple UI to the agent as well providing a rich, graphical configuration on top of the ability to reduce, enrich, and route data to any destination before it ever leaves the system. When combined with Cribl Stream, the two think locally but act globally – centralized management of a massively distributed observability pipeline that provides you with access to more data than previously thought possible.

(psst…All of this is live and available for use today…)

On to the Good Stuff…

We often hear from our customers that collecting logs, metrics, and traces from their distributed infrastructure is a brutally painful and tedious task. There are usually multiple agents, as many as 7–9, each coming from a different vendor, with different configuration, managing, and monitoring capabilities running on compute that can be located just about anywhere. This leads to a complex operating environment that can actually lead to worse visibility at a higher cost.

What if you could manage all those agents (with all the Cribl power-up abilities) from a laptop and your favorite Titan Evo? What if you could consolidate and automate the discovery, exploration, and collection of logs, metrics, and traces? What if you could do that with a ‘zero-config’ agent?

Technology that scales your most valuable resource…YOU!

You may hear us talk about building technology that scales to achieve the unthinkable when it comes to data. The best part about Cribl Edge is that it actually scales the one thing most companies don’t think about – YOU. Edge is built, from the ground up, to alleviate the most painful aspects of data collection.

Managing and monitoring multiple agents running on thousands of nodes is effectively operating N very large distributed systems. One of Cribl Edge’s most powerful features is its ability to centrally configure, manage, and monitor groups of Cribl Edge nodes as a unit – we call this unit a Fleet.

In many organizations, the infrastructure is partitioned in multiple logical groups, each of which serves different purposes and has different monitoring needs. Cribl Edge allows administrators to address this problem by configuring multiple Cribl Edge Fleets, one per resource group.

Cribl Edge also provides rich, centralized monitoring of its managed nodes. Pre-built dashboards highlight the operating status of the nodes and offer deep visibility into the data flow.

One More Thing …

One of the coolest features of centrally managing Cribl Edge is your ability to “teleport” into any of the Edge Nodes. Here you can explore the metrics and log data that it has auto-discovered, as well as perform manual discovery and exploration. The ability to explore data at the edge empowers users to not only identify data that needs to be collected, but – more importantly – perform root-cause analysis and troubleshooting on a single node. Take it for a spin, you’ll love it!

Autodiscovery of Logs

The first step when collecting observability data is to identify which data to collect and where that data lives. When it comes to logs, for example, you need to know the path that the log files of interest are being written to. In environments with hundreds of applications, updated constantly, maintaining the list of log locations turns into a nightmare. Cribl Edge to the rescue! Edge automatically discovers log files from running processes eliminating the need to maintain a list manually. Not only that, if you’re handed a legacy application your level of knowledge of how it works doesn’t change the requirement to gather logs and metrics for the security and ops teams! Here autodiscovery is a life saver. Want to gain full visibility without apriori knowledge of how the application runs or what to collect? Done and done…

In the meantime, back at your TItan Evo and laptop, Cribl Edge’s rich, web-based UI provides you a simple means of data exploration and configuration. Jump on and see what metrics and log files have been discovered, as well as interactively explore those files’ content before deciding how to process and route them.

Poof! You just scaled! Fleets managed, data auto-discovered, decisions made on what to forward – the edge is now your oyster!

Summary

We’re excited to get Edge and all our Stream upgrades and enhancements into customers’ hands. If you’re new to Cribl, or to the concept of an Observability Pipeline, try our free Sandboxes. Each includes a full version of Stream or Edge in the cloud, with preconfigured data to help you try out specific features. You can see how easy it is to take control of your logging infrastructure to improve system performance, slash costs, and route observability data into the destinations that matter most.

When you’re ready to go further, create a free Cribl.Cloud account to start streaming today. Join us tomorrow to learn more about Cribl Edge and Cribl Stream!