If you are familiar with Cribl’s solutions, you know that we offer our customers choice and control over their data. The entire company is built on the idea that we want to help you get your data from anywhere to anywhere using open standards and open data formats. It is your data, and you have full control over what you collect and how it is handled.

So, you might be saying, Wait a minute! Now that I’m leveraging Cribl, am I just getting locked into Cribl, too? As you invest in technology at all levels, switching is certainly a cost. Vendor lock-in is defined as a situation where the cost of switching to a different vendor is so high that the customer is essentially stuck with the original vendor. Cribl’s products are built on a foundation of open standards to ensure that you have choice and control by:

• Supporting existing log collection agents, avoiding the need for additional installations. (Admins are overwhelmed with agent sprawl already!)
• Integrating with all major analysis systems and SIEMs, ensuring compatibility with current tools. (Replacing these tools is a nightmare!)
• Embracing open protocols like Parquet, NDJSON, OTEL, and MDT so you retain data ownership.
• Allowing data archiving in open formats to cost-effective storage lowers retention costs and simplifies data access across the enterprise.
• Enabling data manipulation in familiar languages like JavaScript and KQL reduces training needs and accelerates setup.
• Allowing you to route data to multiple destinations with no additional cost, to accelerate the testing of other solutions. Check out this blog on SIEM migrations.

Cribl’s products have been designed to work independently, and there is no requirement to use one with the other. Admins can mix and match tools to build the best solution for their business. There is no requirement to invest in the dreaded “platform.” Just the flexibility to solve your problems in the way you think is best. If an admin finds a better option than Cribl, nothing stops them from moving with open formats and protocols.

In most analytics solutions, lock-in occurs at the ingestion layer due to proprietary agents, throughout the data pipeline, and with the formats and schemas enforced by the vendor. The analytics component often requires specific data structures, and storage solutions may limit your options further. Additionally, some vendors restrict deployment to cloud only or a particular cloud provider, making migration difficult.

Cribl seeks to address these challenges to build a different kind of business that serves an underappreciated and often ignored population of admins who run IT and Security Systems of Analysis and SIEMs.

“Instead of being beholden to other vendors to build and maintain parsers or index certain things, everything is now completely within our control with Cribl Stream. It’s a big differentiator for us to tell clients that there’s no data source we can’t work with — and Cribl makes that possible for us.”

Ryan Pinga
Vice President, Cybersecurity, Presidio

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, flexibility is key. Cribl empowers businesses to stay flexible and adaptive without the risk of being locked into proprietary systems. When shaping your data strategy, opt for a solution that prioritizes control, flexibility, and resilience—choose Cribl.

Cribl’s product are built on a foundation of open standards, which offer:

• Data Format Compatibility: Supports widely used formats like Parquet, NDJSON etc. enabling seamless data handling across platforms.
• Widely Adopted Languages: Kusto Query Language (KQL) and JavaScript both have widespread adoption in the market vs a specialized Cribl language
• Interoperability with Open Source Tools: Works effortlessly with leading open-source technologies such as OpenSearch, Apache Kafka, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry (OTEL).
• RESTful APIs: Facilitates the automation of workflows and integration with third-party tools, adhering to open API standards.
• Cloud-Native Infrastructure: Manage Cribl solutions across major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, making deployment and scaling frictionless.

Cribl was founded on these principles that we must live up to daily.

“At Cribl, we believe in the value of a diverse, open ecosystem of data. Customers need a platform that is open, interoperable, and works with enterprises’ existing toolsets and investments. Our product suite focuses on providing customers unprecedented levels of choice and control. We believe customers should be able to make choices rather than compromises in regards to their data.”

Clint Sharp
CEO, Cribl

Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, empowers organizations to transform their data strategy. Customers use Cribl’s suite of products to collect, process, route, and analyze all IT and security data, delivering the flexibility, choice, and control required to adapt to their ever-changing needs.

We offer free training, certifications, and a free tier across our products. Our community Slack features Cribl engineers, partners, and customers who can answer your questions as you get started and continue to build and evolve. We also offer a variety of hands-on Sandboxes for those interested in how companies globally leverage our products for their data challenges.