SAN FRANCISCO, CA — March 23, 2026 — Cribl, the AI Platform for Telemetry, today announced background detection for Cribl Guard, an AI-driven capability designed to continuously scan in-flight logs, traces, and events to uncover previously unknown sensitive data patterns. This new capability adds a proactive intelligence layer to Cribl Guard, empowering security professionals to identify hidden data risks before they result in exposure.
With background detection, Cribl Guard proactively finds new patterns of personally identifiable information (PII), secrets, and regulated data — including patterns that existing rules have never seen. Unlike external DLP tools that require copying streams out of your environment, the purpose-built AI model runs entirely within Cribl Workers, ensuring sensitive data analysis never leaves the customer's own infrastructure.
“Security and IT teams don’t want to enable AI and agentic assistants on sensitive data and face costly, time-consuming cleanups. By analyzing data flowing through pipelines, background detection catches sensitive information in flight before it even gets to a data store," said Dritan Bitincka, co-founder & chief product officer of Cribl. “This helps organizations transition from static policy enforcement to continuous, AI-driven risk discovery and mitigation.”
Background detection is powered by Cribl’s telemetry AI models that identify new, unknown sensitive data, that immediately surface the finding in the Cribl interface. Security and observability professionals can investigate the sampled events with full event context, dismiss them if appropriate, or instantly convert findings into new Guard rules with a single action. This shortens the path from AI‑driven detection to enforced protection before sensitive data reaches downstream destinations such as SIEMs, data lakes, and observability platforms.
"In today's complex, data-rich environments, security teams can't afford to wait for sensitive data to land in a SIEM before they act. Cribl Guard's background detection, powered by purpose-built AI, fundamentally shifts the security paradigm from reactive cleanup to proactive, in-flight risk mitigation," said Stuart Bowell, Global Head of Observability, Security and Telemetry, NETbuilder. “It directly addresses the challenges of shadow IT, giving our shared customers the confidence to accelerate their data initiatives while remaining compliant and secure."
Key benefits of Cribl Guard background detection include:
Uncover Hidden Risk Before Exposure: Automatically detects new PII, secrets, and regulated data that existing static rules may have missed, reducing the likelihood of audit fines, breach notifications, and expensive remediation efforts.
Detection to Protection in One Step: The moment a risk is identified, a security admin can efficiently turn it into an active Guard rule, saving time and leading to faster, more confident security decisions.
Strengthen Audit Readiness: Provides defensible evidence of ongoing monitoring and documented mitigation, replacing reliance on rulesets that haven't been revisited in months.
Keep Sensitive Data Inside Your Infrastructure: The custom AI model runs within your own Cribl Workers, so sensitive data is never processed outside your environment — a critical distinction from external DLP tools.
By keeping a custom AI model in the Worker, a node where the data is being emitted and constantly analyzing data streams in the background, Cribl helps prevent unexpected sensitive data exposures before they become incidents, minimizing financial and operational impacts for the enterprise.
