So many businesses today are playing “Hungry, Hungry, (Data) Hippo,” devouring every marble of information they can get their hands on. While it seems like every company has a robust data aggregation system, what most companies don’t have is an efficient way to control what data they store and where that data goes.

We all want to make data-driven business decisions, but sorting through tons of data to find useful business insights can be like finding a needle in a whole farm. What if data could be organized automatically before it reached your storage systems?

The “Too Much Data” Problem

Every transaction online produces exhaust data. Let’s say you buy a ticket from an airline. Of course, there’s a transactional record of the sale, but there’s also a huge amount of information leading up to the sale. What were the touchpoints between you and the airline? Did you visit a flight aggregator like Kayak.com to find the best deal? Did you search “cheap flights” on Google before clicking on a paid ad for the airline?

By collecting and analyzing this exhaust data, the airline can get a complete view of your customer journey, which they can use to improve their marketing and sales processes. But that’s not all: exhaust data logs can help a business understand things like which parts of their online systems are operating smoothly, which need work, and where there are potential security threats in their application programming.

Usually, all this kind of data ends up in a logging analytics platform, like Splunk or Elastic. Then, it’s up to the business to dig through an insane amount of data and analyze it to form useful business and security insights.

The problem is that the amount of data that companies collect is immense. Even small companies can gather terabytes of data daily. It’s not uncommon for larger organizations to gather hundreds of terabytes in a single day.

What’s more, much of the information that reaches your logging analytics tool is useless. Things like null values, duplicate fields, or chatty Windows XML event logs all take up space in your platform, wasting your company’s money and storage.

Cribl Stream to the Rescue

That’s where Cribl Stream comes in. It’s a data observability tool that operates as a middleman between data sources and destinations. Cribl Stream gives your business greater control of where your data (logs, events, metrics, and traces) goes, what kind of shape the data is in, and how it’s enriched or redacted.

The reasons companies may need to route data to multiple destinations are numerous. For example, a company might want to take data from an agent like Splunk Forwarder, or AWS Kinesis, and route it to a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) product they’re testing. Conversely, a business might use Cribl Stream to reduce the amount of data platforms they route information to after a merger.

Cribl Stream also cuts down on the amount of useless information that your company stores. In some cases, Cribl can reduce the amount of data that reaches your logging analytics platform by more than half. Imagine the headspace your company could have for new data types, like cyber security insights, for example, if your analytics tools weren’t bogged down by pointless data.

Cribl Stream even helps with your security issues. The platform can do things like enrich data with GoIP information or reach out to a threat intelligence database to identify indicators of compromise. Additionally, you can program Cribl Stream to automatically redact PII while data is in flight.

Making Better Business Decisions with Better Data Management

Data-driven business decisions are generally better business decisions, but you can drown in a sea of data if you don’t have a lifeboat to get you where you want to go. Cribl Stream is a data speedboat! Spin up one of our Cribl Sandboxes to see for yourself!

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.