In my role as a Solutions Engineer at Cribl, I support agencies across every segment of the Federal government to improve their observability strategies. With IT operations continually evolving, SREs, application owners, and DevOps teams within the Federal government face unique challenges.These range from managing and making sense of vast amounts of data, to operating in low-bandwidth or contested environments. In this blog post, I'll share insights based upon my work with Federal agencies and how Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge have been instrumental in modernizing their approach to observability.
Case Study: Dealing with the Data Deluge
The Challenge
Agencies are struggling to deal with an overwhelming amount of operational data, while also attempting to comply with unique Federal requirements for data retention and reporting. These conditions exacerbate an already challenging environment that includes:
Ingesting data into the appropriate analytic tools: Multiple analytic tools are deployed within large organizations and many teams struggle with onboarding the right data into the right tool in the format that tool expects
Agent Sprawl: Multiple data collection agents are installed and maintained on a single endpoint to service the various analytics tools chosen over time
DDIL Environments: Operating in Denied, Degraded, Intermittent and Limited bandwidth (DDIL) environments and the unique complexities that come with it
Security Compliance: Strict security protocols mandate careful handling and masking of sensitive data.
High Storage Costs: Due to retention requirements, retaining large volumes of data in premium storage solutions is financially impractical
Infrastructure Constraints: Limited compute and processing capabilities within remote environments
The Impact on IT Operations and SRE Teams
These challenges directly affect the daily work of IT operations teams and SREs who need to maintain mission-critical applications. As data volumes grow, environments become more complex, more tools are added and requirements change, these individuals find themselves struggling with:
Increased Complexity in Day-to-Day Operations
Confusion over data ownership and can create blind spots in performance monitoring. The complexity within these environments results in longer mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) when issues arise.Slower Incident Response
SREs and IT operators often spend a significant amount of time correlating and normalizing data instead of responding to incidents. This delay can increase downtime and impact critical systemsIncreasing Operational Costs
High storage costs and uncontrolled data growth causes operational costs to grow. Ultimately, teams face the difficult choice about which data to retain and which data to discard, potentially losing valuable insights and leaving parts of their environment exposedStrained Resources in Certain Environments
In denied, degraded, intermittent, and low-bandwidth (DDIL) environments with limited computing resources, the organization must prioritize what data to collect, process, and store which can cause the agency to miss out on key performance or security data.Ongoing Security and Compliance Requirements
Organizations need to comply with stringent security standards and ensure that team members only have access to the necessary administrative functions.
Ultimately, these operational challenges undermine the very mission SREs and IT teams are there to support. By recognizing the real-world impacts of these common challenges, agencies and their IT teams can better prioritize and invest in solutions that offer both immediate and long-term benefits.
Taking on the Challenge with Cribl
1. Getting Data into Systems of Analysis
Cribl Stream acts as a universal receiver for all of an agency’s observability (log, metric, and trace) data. Stream can easily capture existing metric and log sources that an organization has operating within their environment and enable the agency to capture data that they previously lacked visibility into due to difficulty onboarding.
Cribl Stream supports a wide range of data sources commonly used by observability and IT operations teams. Beyond OpenTelemetry (OTEL), Model Driven Telemetry (MDT), SNMP, and NetFlow, Cribl Stream can also collect and route:
Syslog and Journald Logs: Capture critical system-level information from Unix/Linux environments.
Windows Event Logs: Monitor and troubleshoot infrastructure and application performance on Windows platforms.
Container and Application Logs: Gain visibility into containerized workloads, including Docker and Kubernetes,
Cloud Services and Metrics: Ingest and process logs, metrics, and traces from popular cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their native services (e.g., CloudWatch, Azure Monitor).
Recent trends include agencies looking to adopt DevSecOps workflows with Kubernetes. Cribl’s lightweight, universal observability agent, Cribl Edge, allows the agency to easily capture metric and log data from within a Kubernetes environment. Edge integrates with Prometheus as a vendor-neutral scraper to provide reliable, scalable, and query-ready metric data.
Cribl Stream can integrate with all of the major time-series databases and monitoring systems to ensure that the most appropriate data is routed to the system that has the greatest impact on the mission.
2. Consolidating Collection Mechanisms and Agents
I have seen several instances where an organization has deployed multiple logging and observability agents (Splunk UF + Elastic Filebeats as an example) to effectively capture the same data but route the data to different backend tools. Organizations are further challenged by maintaining and upgrading these agents at scale. By standardizing on Cribl Edge, the organization has a single observability agent that can be centrally managed from a single console and can easily upgrade and push out configuration updates.
Cribl Edge supports Linux, Windows (Servers, Laptops, and Desktops!), and Kubernetes environments and can capture both metrics and logs from these environments. Cribl Edge can easily route the data to a Cribl Stream Worker Node for centralized processing or route the data directly to one (or more) destinations.
3. Routing Data to Multiple Destinations
Large organizations leverage different analytical tools for different purposes. Cribl allows the agency to capture the data once, and make the intelligent routing decision to send the data to the most appropriate destination(s) in the format optimized for the destination. To meet various retention requirements, Cribl Stream allows Federal organizations the flexibility to route data to cost effective storage, such as AWS S3 or Azure Blob. This data is written to the storage destination in raw, JSON or Parquet format. If the organization ever needs access to this data, Cribl Stream replay allows the agency to easily re-ingest the data into their monitoring tool of choice.
Cribl stream provides an elegant solution to route metric and log data through a cross domain solution. This empowers our Federal customers to get the right data to the right tools at the appropriate classification levels.
4. Ease of Configuration and Management
Cribl offers a simple and intuitive Leader UI to centrally manage the agency's observability collection, formatting and routing tier. It starts with data preview functionality within the Cribl UI to provide an interactive way to work with data in flight. The administrator can take a live capture of a metric or trace, save this capture to work on it later, and create pipelines on this capture without any interruption to the data flow. Once the appropriate data optimizations have been configured, the updated configuration is pushed to the Cribl Stream Worker Nodes or Edge Nodes.
An IT operator or SRE can use the rich UI to explore system metrics, system state, and application logs for a particular Edge Node. This functionality also extends to running processes and containers when running within a containerized environment. This single interface for management of both Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge also allows the administrator the ability to upgrade the Edge Nodes and Stream Worker Nodes from within the UI to minimize deployment complexities.
5. Operating in Resource Constrained Environments
Cribl Stream is typically deployed as close to the source of data as possible, and this is especially true in remote and tactical use cases. By capturing the data within the tactical environment, Cribl Stream and Edge can forward metric data to a monitoring system that is deployed within that remote environment, and send priority logs and metrics back to analysis systems within the central location. If the connectivity back to the central location is unavailable, Cribl can queue the observability data leveraging our Persistent Queuing functionality. Once connectivity is restored, Cribl Stream and Edge will route the queued data to the hub location.
We will drop unnecessary data at the source and convert logs to metrics to best utilize the limited bandwidth available within these unique environments. When transmitting data from the remote location back to the hub, Cribl Stream and Edge will leverage gzip compression to best utilize the limited bandwidth.
By ensuring that only the relevant metric and log data is ingested within the monitoring platforms, the Cribl solution ensures that the agency is best utilizing the limited resources that are available within these remote and tactical environments.
6. Security
In order to meet the security requirements within Federal systems, Cribl Stream offers FIPS mode. When running in FIPS mode, Cribl Stream will leverage algorithms that comply with the FIPS standards. This helps organizations operate securely by enforcing validated encryption methods.
The Cribl solution also offers Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to give administrators the ability to assign granular level permissions based upon a specific group or role within the agency. This level of granularity helps agencies ensure that users can only perform actions relevant to their specific role or job function.
Cribl Stream and Edge also offers the mask function to redact certain data prior to sending the data to the monitoring tool or system of analysis. This is especially useful if the organization wants to share data with a mission partner, but, due to compliance requirements or data sharing agreements, data contained within the metric or log needs to be obfuscated or removed.
From Data Deluge to Mission Success: Cribl’s impact
Federal IT operators and SREs work within unique environments. These teams spend their time managing massive data volumes, ensuring compliance with stringent security mandates, and operating in unique and challenging environments. Cribl addresses these requirements head-on, providing a set of concrete outcomes:
Improved Efficiency
By unifying data collection and routing, Cribl reduces the operational burden of managing multiple monitoring agents
Centralized management leads to quicker troubleshooting and streamlined observability processes.
Cost Savings
Flexible routing to low-cost storage solutions helps agencies retain essential logs without inflating operational budgets.
Reduced agent footprint and optimized data filtering further cut expenses by preventing data overload.
Enhanced Decision-Making
Real-time, normalized data is readily accessible across teams, enabling informed decision-making at all organizational levels.
Silo-free data flows improve collaboration and help identify emerging trends before they become critical issues.
Simplified Operations
Fewer agents and simpler pipelines translate into a lower maintenance overhead for IT teams.
Configuration changes and updates become more manageable, minimizing downtime and complexity.
Reliable Data Flow in DDIL Environments
Cribl Stream’s selective data forwarding ensures the most critical data still reaches its destination in DDIL (Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited-Bandwidth) conditions.
Resource-intense operations can be minimized, maintaining visibility without straining limited infrastructure.
Enhanced Security Compliance
FIPS mode and role-based access control (RBAC) support stringent security requirements.
Cribl’s data masking functionality supports an agency's ability to share data with a mission partner while complying with data sharing agreements
Resource Optimization
By reducing needless data ingestion, teams free up compute and storage resources for other mission-critical tasks.
Improved system performance and lower overhead increase the overall reliability of the agency’s infrastructure.
Conclusion
In the ever-evolving landscape of federal IT operations, having a robust and flexible observability solution is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. Cribl Stream empowers SREs, Application Owners, and DevOps professionals within federal agencies to take control of their data, optimize their operations, and meet their unique challenges head-on.
If you're part of a federal agency looking to enhance your observability strategy, consider how Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge can be a game-changer for your operations. With the ability to get data into systems of analysis, route it efficiently, optimize for constrained environments, and consolidate your data collection mechanisms, Cribl Stream offers a comprehensive solution tailored to the needs of federal IT operations.
About the Author
As a solutions engineer at Cribl, I've worked with multiple federal agencies to tackle their most pressing observability challenges. My experience has shown that with the right tools and strategies, agencies can unlock the full potential of their data, driving better outcomes and more efficient operations.
Get Started Today
Ready to transform your observability pipeline? Learn more about how Cribl Stream can support your mission-critical operations by visiting cribl.io. Join our community of professionals dedicated to optimizing IT operations in the federal space.
