After seven-plus years as an industry analyst at Gartner, I decided it was time to get off the sidelines and get back to building things again. When an opportunity to join Cribl became available, I leaped at the chance.

Cribl focuses on the challenges of observability in modern IT environments. (You can read more on observability here.) I’ve followed the company since shortly after its launch and there are three reasons I’m excited about the opportunity.

The Team

While I knew the founders from their time at Splunk, I didn’t know the rest of the team. I spent months lurking in the Cribl community Slack getting a feel for what the team values. The team is obsessed with their customers. Support is responsive and friendly, and the product is easier to try and deploy than anything else I’ve seen in the observability space. (With nearly 1200 people in community Slack, you should come hang out. We’re smart, funny, modest, and remarkably good-looking.)

Customers

Cribl’s an early-stage startup, but its customers are some of the largest companies you can imagine, each processing petabytes of log data daily. SREs, security, and networking staff at these companies face enormous challenges understanding volatile environments spanning multiple clouds, on-prem, and, increasingly, edge. Modern application realities, like microservices and containers, only compound the complexity.

LogStream allows these teams to process machine data in real-time and deliver it to their analysis platform of choice — before they pay to analyze it. Application data, instrumentation and telemetry data, metrics — all of it can be contextualized, secured, and optimized. This saves money and time by creating a better data product at the right time for the right audience.

Values

Today, attracting the best talent means being remote first. But being remote-first creates challenges defining things like culture and communication. Cribl’s values are well defined and demonstrated by everyone I’ve encountered. The values are easy to understand and act on:

• Customers first, always
• Irreverent, but serious
• Do-acratic
• Transparent
• Together

If this sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work at too, I have good news — we’re hiring!