What do you do when an incident occurs, and you need to investigate and troubleshoot? Replay data.
What about performing audit trails for compliance and reporting? Replay data.
Need to do system testing and validation? Replay data.
There are countless reasons to replay telemetry, but the ease of doing so largely depends on the tools and infrastructure you have in place. Manual replay is often cumbersome and time-consuming, requiring access to stored raw data in logs or files. This process may involve pulling data from many different sources, with data owned by different teams. Writing scripts to parse, process, and resend the data—all while ensuring it’s correctly formatted for the target system is a huge hassle.
Replaying data from cloud storage solutions like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob adds another layer of complexity, requiring additional tools to retrieve, transform, and resend the data, leading to potential delays.
Replay demands time, expertise, and resources. The cost of storing data for potential future replay can be significant. As data volumes grow, it becomes increasingly unrealistic to store everything, forcing organizations to make tough decisions about what to keep and discard while balancing the risks of losing potentially valuable data.
License costs and tool performance often prevent organizations from ingesting all their data or require them to limit data retention time. Security incidents are often discovered long after these retention times are exhausted or require never-ingested data, leaving teams without the full story. When a security team discovers a potential breach, for example, every minute spent wrestling with data access and replay logistics is a minute lost in incident response.
This is where Cribl comes in.
Replay with Cribl Stream
Cribl Stream is a powerful observability pipeline designed to parse, process, and route your data precisely. It ensures you deliver the data you need to the right destinations in the formats you want.
Cribl Stream’s Replay feature transforms data management by simplifying the retrieval and replay of data from object storage to various destinations. Effortlessly pull historical data from any source and send it downstream for analysis, testing, or troubleshooting—all without disrupting your existing analytics systems. Cribl Stream also routes a copy of raw data, including logs, metrics, and traces, to cost-effective object storage, where administrators can define partitioning schemes (e.g., host, date, or sourcetype) to streamline future searches. When needed, relevant data can be quickly re-ingested into analytics systems for investigations, audits, or compliance verification, enabling precise and efficient analysis. Replay ensures your data is always accessible, allowing you to respond to challenges like security events or compliance requirements.
How It Works
Define Configuration
Specify the source where your data is stored (e.g., Cribl Lake, Amazon S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Platform).
Define the destination where the data needs to be replayed to (e.g., analytics tools or operations teams).
Select Data for Replay
Use Collectors (S3, Filesystem) to fetch specific data from storage. Filter the specific subset of data to replay using criteria like time ranges, events, or other conditions.
Filter by file path attributes for optimized efficiency.
Retrieve only the data you need for analysis, reducing unnecessary overhead.
Automate Workflows
Streamline operations by scheduling batch collections from data sources.
Automate data replay to fit into existing workflows, minimizing manual intervention.
Process and Shape Data
Leverage Cribl Stream’s ability to shape data: filter, reduce, enrich, summarize, or aggregate before forwarding it.
Choose data format: Choose JSON (recommended) for its wide compatibility and pre-parsed structure.
Optimize Costs and Retention
Send a full-fidelity copy of raw data to low-cost storage for long-term retention.
Efficiently replay logs and telemetry on demand, avoiding the expense of keeping all data live in analytics tools.
Replay Through Pipelines
Define routing rules based on data content and metadata to send data to various destinations (SIEMs, databases, analytics platforms) for analysis or reporting.
Retrieve historical data from low-cost storage.
Replay the data through Cribl Stream’s pipeline into your destinations, enabling analysis, troubleshooting, or compliance audits.
Combining flexibility, automation, and cost efficiency, Cribl Stream’s Replay functionality ensures your data is always ready for whatever your teams need—without breaking your budget.
Use Cribl Lake to make Replay even easier
To simplify IT and security teams’ jobs, we recently introduced Cribl Lake, a simple, quick-to-deploy, easy-to-use data lake built for telemetry. Data is stored in open formats in Cribl Lake, allowing for seamless replay to analytics tools without the need for complex scripts or manual processes.
Cribl Lake provides a cost-effective solution for retaining large volumes of data over extended periods while keeping it readily accessible for investigations, audits, and testing. While Cribl Stream excels at data routing and replay orchestration, combining it with Cribl Lake creates a seamless telemetry lifecycle. When you pair Cribl Stream’s smart parsing and processing capabilities with Cribl Lake’s purpose-built telemetry storage, users can finally eliminate the traditional friction points of data accessibility, processing overhead, and cross-team dependencies.
Store Data in Cribl Lake Instead of SIEM Archives for Fast Access
Compared to SIEM archives, Cribl Lake offers a streamlined solution for managing data. There is no waiting for data to rehydrate and no delays when you need to access and replay data.
Cribl Lake simplifies data management with intuitive tools for setting retention policies, enforcing unified security and compliance controls, and providing easy access without relying on external cloud teams to create buckets or grant permissions.
Cribl Lake’s ease of use and quick setup mean you can spin up environments in no time, allowing your teams to focus on analysis and decision-making rather than dealing with complex configurations. Unlike object stores or analysis solutions, where managing and retrieving data often requires tickets with data or cloud teams, Cribl Lake puts control in your hands. This autonomy ensures your security data is always accessible by the security team without the typical bottlenecks.
Investigations also become faster and easier as you can run queries directly on the stored data using Cribl Search, without waiting for processing and eliminating the need to move data to expensive analytics systems. Use Cribl Search for visualizations, perform investigations, and generate reports without ingesting data.
