In enterprise IT, new market categories often emerge for two reasons. The first is when vendors try to differentiate themselves in a crowded space, like the creation of XDR by vendors to avoid being compared to established SIEM vendors. The second, and more valuable, creation of a market category is addressing critical gaps in functionality and innovation. It is this second reason that drives innovation and value creation.
One of the most exciting developments in recent years has been the rise of Telemetry Pipelines — a market that helps organizations manage the explosion of observability data generated by modern IT systems and security tools. We are thrilled that Gartner has recognized the importance of this market with an upcoming Market Guide for Telemetry Pipelines.
But what exactly do we feel the Gartner report means? Why is a Market Guide important, and how does it differ from other Gartner research? Let’s dive into the details and explore the implications for this market category.
First - What Is a Gartner Market Guide?
A Gartner Market Guide is a research report offering a comprehensive overview of an emerging or evolving market. It’s a roadmap for organizations to understand the landscape, evaluate key players, and assess the value of investing in a specific technology category.
Unlike the popular Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ or Critical Capabilities reports, which evaluate and rank vendors based on specific criteria, we believe a Market Guide focuses on:
Defining the market: What is the technology, and what problems does it solve?
Identifying market trends: What are the drivers and challenges shaping this space?
Recognizing vendors: Who are the current players, and what role do they play?
Providing actionable recommendations: How should organizations approach this technology, and what should they consider when evaluating vendors?
For the Telemetry Pipelines market, we feel this recognition signals a major advancement: acknowledgment by one of the world’s leading research and advisory firms that this market is critical to modern enterprise operations. This report is doubly special for Cribl as we believe we are the creator in the Telemetry Pipelines space.
Why Telemetry Pipelines Are Gaining Momentum
Telemetry Pipelines address a fundamental problem in today’s IT and observability landscape: the exponential growth–and exponential cost–of machine data. With the rise of microservices architectures, hybrid cloud environments, and edge computing, organizations are generating massive volumes of logs, metrics, and traces — telemetry data that is essential for understanding system performance, security, and user experience.
However, managing this data effectively is a monumental challenge. Traditional observability tools often struggle with:
Volume: The sheer scale of data overwhelms systems, driving up costs.
Complexity: Data originates from disparate sources, making it difficult to correlate and analyze.
Governance: Telemetry data often contains PII that must be protected, which is a challenge at the volumes enterprises are dealing with.
Vendor lock-in: Organizations are often forced to commit to a single observability platform, limiting flexibility and innovation.
As the leading Telemetry Pipeline, Cribl Stream uniquely solves these challenges by providing a flexible, vendor-agnostic way to route, enrich, and process telemetry data in real time. This enables organizations to:
Reduce costs by optimizing data before sending it to observability tools.
Improve agility by decoupling data sources from destinations.
Gain deeper insights through advanced data processing and enrichment.
Cribl’s growth underscores the value that Telemetry Pipelines deliver to enterprises worldwide. We recently surpassed $200M in ARR, just 14 months after hitting $100M in ARR. Clearly, the need for Telemetry Pipeline solutions has never been greater, or more obvious.
What the Gartner Market Guide Means for Telemetry Pipelines
In our opinion, this long-awaited document is significant for several reasons:
Validation of the Market
We feel the Gartner recognition signals that Telemetry Pipelines have moved beyond early adoption and are now a critical component of the enterprise IT stack. This acknowledgment provides confidence to organizations that are evaluating whether to invest in this technology. Analyst firms are often backwards looking indicators of enterprise maturity. Cribl feels this Market Guide is an important signal that pipelines should be mission critical components in your infrastructure.
Market Clarity
As an emerging category, the Telemetry Pipelines market is still taking shape. The Market Guide helps define what this market is and how it fits into the broader security and ITOps ecosystems. Organizations will gain a clearer understanding of the key use cases and benefits of Telemetry Pipelines, as well as the key factors to use when evaluating vendors. Capabilities such as global monitoring, data health, and edge data collection and management are key. Beyond technical requirements, strong partnership and distribution capabilities, training, and customer success will mean the difference between success and failure on the Telemetry Pipeline journey.
Discussion on Innovation
A Market Guide also discusses/touches on the vendors involved in innovation in the space. For companies like Cribl, we feel this is an opportunity to showcase its clear market differentiation. It also encourages competition, which drives further advancements in the technology.
Catalyst for Growth
From our view, the Gartner report often acts as a catalyst, accelerating adoption by bringing visibility to the market. As more organizations learn about the value of Telemetry Pipelines, we can expect to see rapid growth in this space.
The Future of Telemetry Pipelines
This Market Guide is just the beginning. The future of Telemetry Pipelines is incredibly bright, with several trends poised to shape the market. We believe Cribl is advancing in the space with:
AI and Machine Learning
Advanced analytics powered by AI/ML enable organizations to extract even greater value from telemetry data. Predictive capabilities will allow for proactive issue resolution and improved decision-making, and copilot-based features speed up data ingestion, processing, and observability.
Edge Computing
As edge computing grows, the notion of what the edge is becomes murky. This confusion highlights the need for efficient telemetry data processing at the edge drives innovation in Telemetry Pipelines. Many of our customers today are optimizing at the edge using Cribl Edge, allowing them to optimize data at its source, as well as offload proprietary agents when migrating tools like SIEMs or APMs.
Ecosystem Expansion
A key part of Telemetry Pipelines are their integrations with sources and destinations. While this sounds like a purely technical effort, effective integrations require ecosystems of partners collaborating on better customer outcomes. Cribl continues leading the way with its technology alliances program, Cribl for Startups, and robust network of channel and service partners. These partnerships and collaborations create a more interconnected security and observability ecosystem.
Focus on Cost Optimization
With the ever-growing scale of telemetry data, cost management remains a top priority. Telemetry Pipelines will continue to play a key role in helping organizations optimize their observability spend, but companies must ensure they’re not spending a dollar on pipelines to save a nickel on their destinations. Cribl offers unmatched insight on costs, and how those costs change over time. We’re investing heavily in our FinOps capabilities to ensure our customers are always in control.
Conclusion
In our opinion, the Gartner Market Guide for Telemetry Pipelines marks a pivotal moment for this emerging market. It validates the importance of Telemetry Pipelines as a critical technology for modern enterprises, provides clarity on the market landscape, and paves the way for broader adoption.
For organizations struggling to manage the deluge of telemetry data, Telemetry Pipelines offer a transformative solution. And for Cribl, a vendor in the space, we are excited to be able to share this report with you.
As the market continues to evolve, we look forward to seeing how the Gartner coverage of Telemetry Pipelines shape the future of observability and enterprise IT. Stay tuned for more updates as this exciting journey unfolds!
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.