It’s Earth Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness of the climate crisis and bringing about behavioral change to help our planet. If you’re reading this blog post though, you probably spend a lot of your time protecting and supporting a different type of environment. In this blog, we’ll take a look at a few effects of climate change and some high-level use cases for Cribl Stream.

Rising Sea Levels (and the Data Deluge)

According to the EPA, when averaged over all of the world’s oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.12 inches per year since 1993. By reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we can better manage global sea level and high-tide flooding.

Data volumes are also rising, at about a 25% CAGR. IT and Security teams can use Stream to manage growing data volumes by filtering out duplicate and extraneous events or trimming unneeded fields from events – anything that’s not contributing to insights.

Cutting down those pesky greenhouse emissions and reducing data thoughtfully with Stream can help ease sea level rise and data growing pains, respectively.

Putting Out Fires

Climate change leads to more drought and higher temperatures, making it easy for fires to start and spread. In turn, wildfires release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; it’s a vicious cycle. There are lots of ways to prevent forest fires, from everyday behavior changes to policy reform.

But if you’re in the IT or Security space, fires are inevitable. It’s how you respond to them that matters. With Stream, you can use Webhooks to trigger incidents in the PagerDuty API or your favorite incident response platform. The Pagerduty Pack makes deployment even easier.

Beyond the Data: Effecting Long-Term Change

Ultimately, doing what’s best for the environment is about sustainability: making the most of what you have and ensuring you (or others) continue to get value from it in the long term. Observability is a great tool to manage your resources too. When you’ve got a good observability practice going, you know (among other things) whether or not you need to run certain services all the time. That way you better manage costs. Depending on your business goals and mission, observability can help your team have a positive environmental impact as well.

Let’s say you’re a manufacturing and logistics company looking to get insights from your distribution centers and vehicles. When you have a true observability pipeline like Cribl Stream in place, you have access to real-time visibility of the goods and services you have in stock, along with telemetry data from your vehicles’ sensors. Observing changes in warehouse data, vehicle to and fro, and consumer behavior can help your company reduce its carbon footprint. If you find that most of your customers buy on the same day of the week or live in the same few areas for example, there’s a huge opportunity to optimize your vehicle driving routes for greater efficiency, faster delivery, and – that’s right – less emissions.

Wrapping Up

At first, it may seem like Earth Day has zero relationship to observability data. In reality, a lot of parallels exist between the two, from the terminology used to the impact they can have. So to all my IT and Security professionals out there thinking “What the grok does climate change have to do with logs, metrics, and traces?” The answer just might be “more than you think.”

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Get started with Stream today by signing up at Cribl.Cloud. For those going another type of green, we “rolled” out our Packs contest on 4/20. Submit your Pack for a chance to win!