The proliferation of applications, services and IT systems (public cloud, private cloud and on-prem) is leading to an explosion of log and event data in enterprises today. While this data has the potential to provide critical insight to IT, security, DevOps and business teams, the volume of data is overwhelming most organizations.
As the CEO of AppDynamics through 2019, I had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of enterprise IT leaders who consistently asked me for my thoughts on a reference architecture for their emerging observability stack. They were fully committed to adopting core observability principles, but were struggling with the number of domain specific monitoring tools, the exploding cost of data storage, the lack of data governance controls and the brittle pair-wise systems integration required to correlate across the data silos. I always had a hard time providing guidance, because, frankly, there were no great enterprise-grade solutions to these problems. That is, until now.
I first met Clint Sharp, Cribl’s co-founder and CEO, about six months ago and we immediately hit it off because he and his co-founders (Ledion and Dritan) had solved this problem by developing a strategic middle layer that allows enterprises to streamline their data architecture, control, shape and route data in real-time at incredible volumes and unlock the value of their data while reducing costs. They were successfully deploying Cribl into many of the world’s biggest brands and most complex enterprise environments – and customers were so successful that they were quickly expanding their use of Cribl.
That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that Greylock co-led the Series C investment in Cribl, a four-year-old observability pipeline company that has emerged as a critical part of the next generation log and data stack and that I’m excited to work with Clint, Ledion, Dritan, the management team and the Board to help on the next leg of their journey!
Cribl is taking an open approach to the flow of data in the enterprise. Their universal receiver can take in logs from any source, while their AppScope product allows customers to instrument any additional sources not currently covered. This flexibility provides unparalleled coverage across enterprise IT systems as data flows into Cribl’s flagship product, LogStream.
Logstream offers an entirely new, vendor-agnostic way to parse and route any type of event data that flows through corporate IT systems. Cribl’s LogStream has created an observability pipeline that offers unequaled control across IT systems – as data is now normalized by Cribl in LogStream, any data source can now be compatible with any data sink. This gives companies the freedom to choose their own analytics tools and storage destinations from a diverse range of best-of-breed data solutions without fear of vendor lock-in, complementing tools such as Splunk, Datadog, and Exabeam.
Cribl has seen strong early adoption, working with dozens of the largest enterprises including TransUnion, Autodesk, and many more. Customers are getting broad-based strategic benefits using Cribl: they can combine and correlate data in new ways, expand collection from new sources, realize faster response time with earlier detections in the stream, empower a broader employee base with self-service access to logs, and enforce data privacy rules just to name a few. Cribl also has an incredibly intuitive UI for analysts and is simple to manage – customers have remarked on how easy it is to deploy Cribl in a distributed environment and add nodes, allowing high throughput with very low latency and zero downtime.
A team rich with experience from Splunk, co-founders Clint Sharp (CEO), Ledion Bitincka (CTO), and Dritan Bitincka (Head of Product) are uniquely positioned to create this new layer. I’ve been thoroughly impressed by Clint, who has both a compelling vision for a massive market undergoing significant change as well as tremendous customer-centricity. Enterprises I spoke with explained how Clint could understand and articulate their problems in a way few others can. I also heard how Ledion and Dritan are generational engineering leaders and learned so much from my interaction with them as they described their plans for the future of Cribl’s engineering platform.
We at Greylock believe Cribl is one of the most important companies to come along in a long time, and we are thrilled to partner with the team as they enter their next phase of growth and beyond.
