This is my first blog post since joining Cribl,  and I’m excited to share some of my experiences during the first 90 days on the job as a Product Manager. Prior to product management, my career encompassed professional services, technical marketing, and engineering—all within the realm of enterprise data tools. Naturally, I was eager to dive into the world of Cribl, the data engine for IT and Security.

My onboarding journey was divided into a 30/60/90 day plan, where I had the opportunity to meet the team, learn the technology, develop a project, and collaborate with cross-functional teammates to ship my first feature as a Criblanian. While I won’t delve into the specifics of customer calls, I want to emphasize how essential direct customer interaction was during my onboarding. This hands-on approach provided invaluable insights into our users and their needs, forming the bedrock of effective product management.

The Culture at Cribl

The culture at Cribl is incredible. From day one, I sensed something unique—and it wasn’t just the goat jokes! There is an undeniable passion throughout the company, with team members driven to deliver their best work. I’ve always thrived in a “work hard, play hard” environment, so I immediately felt at home.

Cribl University: A Strong Start

One of my first major milestones within the first 30 days was completing the Cribl University certification courses. For those unfamiliar, Cribl offers multiple products, including Cribl Stream, Cribl Edge, Cribl Search, and Cribl Lake, to address a wide range of data challenges. Cribl’s certifications are available online for free and designed for self-paced learning, a feature I appreciate as it allows for flexibility—speeding through known concepts and taking extra time on more complex topics.

The initial certification, Certified User, covers the basics of Cribl Stream, Edge, Lake, and Search, laying a solid foundation. The Level 2 Certified Administrator courses build on this by incorporating hands-on labs, quizzes, and final tests to ensure key concepts are retained. Although there’s a lot of material to cover, trust the process and take it step by step.

Building a Lab: Hands-On Learning

Armed with new skills from the certification courses, I set out to build a lab. The goal was to instrument a Kubernetes deployment and experiment with live data to showcase the power of Cribl’s data-in-motion transformation capabilities.

To get started, I deployed a K8s cluster with the OpenTelemetry Demo and set up a DaemonSet running Edge to route logs and metrics to Stream. While Edge can process data directly on the host, for this project, I configured it as an agent directing data to Cribl Stream for processing before sending it to Cribl Lake. Cribl Lake, a cost-effective object store, simplifies the setup compared to traditional cloud object storage and allows data to be queried in place using Cribl Search. In the final stage of the lab, I leveraged Cribl Search to create dashboards centered around RED (Rate, Error, Duration) metrics for a synthetic e-commerce shop, showcasing the end-to-end potential of Cribl’s suite.

Collaborating on the Pack Dispensary

As I moved into the final phase of onboarding, I began collaborating with the scrum team, focusing on the Cribl Pack Dispensary. The Pack Dispensary hosts configuration bundles that help streamline common use cases for Cribl Stream and Edge. With the recent addition of Search, one of my first tasks was integrating Search packs into the Dispensary. These Search packs extend beyond routes and pipelines, offering dashboards that enable users to quickly search and visualize data as soon as they log into Search.

Another enhancement was the addition of permalinks, allowing users to share direct URLs to specific packs with their team. This might seem like a small detail, but when you search for something like “windows” in the Dispensary, you’ll understand how impactful this feature is.

This marked completing my first 90 days as a Cribl Product Manager. I’m looking forward to continuing this journey and sharing more updates as we expand and enhance Cribl’s products.

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.