Learn how to overcome the inefficiencies of legacy telemetry replay methods and discover how Cribl Stream and Cribl Lake work. In this session, we cover...
The challenges associated with traditional telemetry replay methods and how they impact incident response, compliance efforts, and operational efficiency.
The capabilities of Cribl Stream's Replay feature in simplifying data retrieval, transformation, and re-ingestion for further analysis, testing, or troubleshooting.
How Cribl Lake serves as a purpose-built telemetry storage solution, offering cost-effective long-term retention and rapid data accessibility.
The seamless integration of Cribl Stream and Cribl Lake in optimizing your telemetry replay workflows with a live demo.
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In a world where data volumes are exploding and the stakes of digital operations continue to rise, organizations face an ongoing dilemma: how to retain critical telemetry data for future use without bearing the overwhelming cost of keeping it always hot and immediately accessible. This is where the concept of data replay becomes transformative.
Too often, archived data is treated as cold, dormant, or less useful. But in reality, data doesn’t lose its value once it’s archived. Quite the opposite: being able to retrieve and replay historical data on demand and with full context can revolutionize how businesses approach observability, security, compliance, and analytics.
Why Replay is Essential
Replay is the key to balancing flexibility and cost. It lets you store full-fidelity telemetry in low-cost object storage while enabling you to pull it back into your pipeline only when needed. This makes it an essential strategy for companies seeking to stay agile without overcommitting budgets to expensive analytics platforms or cloud infrastructure.
Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, was built precisely to serve this purpose. Using Cribl Stream and Cribl Lake together, organizations can store data efficiently and replay it quickly, securely, and intelligently- supporting critical workflows from incident response to compliance audits and machine learning initiatives.
The Challenges of Traditional Replay
While the concept of replay sounds simple, executing it using legacy tools or cloud-native storage solutions is often anything but. Storing large volumes of data long-term can be costly, while access is often slow and complex due to fragmented infrastructure and access controls. Data may be spread across multiple clouds, formats, and ownership domains, making retrieval cumbersome. Worse yet, replay often requires support tickets, manual formatting, and extensive reprocessing, adding significant delay and overhead to already urgent tasks.
A Smarter Way to Replay and Retrieve Data
Modern teams need a way to access historical telemetry on demand: without the cost and delay of replaying massive datasets. The ideal approach is selective, fast, and flexible: pull only the data you need, apply enrichment and transformations, and route it directly where it’s needed, whether for investigation, compliance, or analytics.
Cribl makes this possible. With Cribl Stream, organizations can retrieve, filter, enrich, and transform data from any object storage, including S3, Azure Blob, or Cribl Lake, and replay it into their analytics or security tools with speed and precision. Cribl Lake complements this by acting as a schema-on-read telemetry lake, enabling teams to store data in open formats without upfront parsing and later query or replay it as needed. With built-in tiered storage and the ability to query data in place using Cribl Search, Cribl offers the flexibility to access historical data on your terms – reducing cost and complexity while increasing control.
Real-World Use Cases for Replay
Replay serves a wide array of mission-critical scenarios:
1. Observability and Troubleshooting
Rather than store logs, metrics, and traces indefinitely in expensive observability tools, organizations can route data to object storage and replay it on demand into their tools only when needed. This speeds up issue resolution while significantly reducing storage costs.
2. Security Investigations
Time is of the essence when a breach occurs. Replay allows security teams to instantly pull full-fidelity logs into their SIEM or analytics platform, enriched with context like threat intelligence, GeoIP info, or asset metadata. This minimizes false positives, accelerates root cause analysis, and supports more accurate threat detection.
3. Compliance and Audit
With regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA requiring retention of raw telemetry data, Cribl’s replay capability ensures that this data is accessible on demand, without duplicating storage or overwhelming compliance teams. Audit trails become easier to generate, manage, and report.
4. Compliance and Audit
Time is of the essence when a breach occurs. Replay allows security teams to instantly pull full-fidelity logs into their SIEM or analytics platform, enriched with context like threat intelligence, GeoIP info, or asset metadata. This minimizes false positives, accelerates root cause analysis, and supports more accurate threat detection.
Turning Replay into an Operational Advantage
To truly benefit from historical telemetry, replay must be fast, precise, and tightly integrated into your existing workflows. Whether you're investigating a security incident or retrieving audit logs, you need full control over what you bring back and how you use it.
That’s exactly what Cribl enables. With Cribl Stream, teams can filter by timeframe, apply transformation packs, enrich data with lookups, and route it directly to their tools. Replay jobs can even be previewed before execution, giving teams visibility into what they’re about to retrieve. The result: no surprises, no unnecessary data movement, just actionable insight, exactly when it’s needed.
Analyze First, Only Replay if Needed
Sometimes, replay isn’t the best first move. The ability to query data where it lives without replaying it can save time, reduce costs, and accelerate decision-making. For many teams, especially those looking to lower SIEM ingestion costs, a “query-first” approach is the smarter path.
Cribl supports this with Cribl Search, which allows users to query data in place from Cribl Lake or any object store before deciding whether replay is necessary. This gives teams the power to analyze and triage first, then selectively replay only what’s relevant, avoiding wasteful data transfers and reducing infrastructure spend.
The Bottom Line: Flexibility, Efficiency, Control
Replay gives you the freedom to store data affordably, use it when needed, and enrich it with the necessary context. With Cribl, organizations can:
Reduce ingest and storage costs by offloading data to cheaper storage tiers.
Improve audit readiness with instant data access.
Respond to security incidents faster with context-enriched telemetry data.
Train AI models and uncover insights with access to years of telemetry data.
Replay is not just about recovering old data. It’s about unlocking new possibilities for how you use, govern, and activate your data. Cribl makes this easy, efficient, and scalable.
Ready to Explore the Power of Replay
Watch the on-demand webinar, download the Replay Solution Brief, or get started with Cribl today.