Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2023

Using Cribl Stream to Correct Misconfigured Data in Datadog

The challenge for every organization is gathering actionable observability information from all your systems, in a timely manner, without creating a substantial operational burden for the teams managing the collection tooling. While each observability solution has its unique benefits and challenges, the one common burden expressed by teams is the management of the metadata of the metrics, traces, and logs.

Pick 3 for Your Data Management: Speed, Choice, and Flexibility

Data growth has significantly out-pacing budgets; the products we use, have to do more. This is where optimization comes into play. Generally, optimization is associated with reduction which may be intimidating…what if something important is reduced? How can you identify what should be reduced? Reduction isn’t about removing context, but about removing repetitive data, meaningless fields, or even flattening JSON.

Navigating Data Overload with Cribl

So many businesses today are playing “Hungry, Hungry, (Data) Hippo,” devouring every marble of information they can get their hands on. While it seems like every company has a robust data aggregation system, what most companies don’t have is an efficient way to control what data they store and where that data goes. We all want to make data-driven business decisions, but sorting through tons of data to find useful business insights can be like finding a needle in a whole farm.

Your Secret Weapon Against Cyber Threats: Enhancing Cyber Resiliency With Cribl

In a previous webinar, we discussed the importance of ensuring that your enterprise is cyber resilient and the politics around establishing a thriving cybersecurity practice within your organization. This week’s discussion covers specific tactics and solutions you can implement when you begin this initiative — watch the full webinar replay to learn more about how Cribl supports your cyber resiliency efforts.

Building a Distributed Security Team

In this live stream, Cjapi’s James Curtis joins me to discuss the challenges of building a distributed global security team. Watch the full video or read on to learn about some hard-won examples of how to be successful with remote team building and management. Talent is hard to find, and companies are hiring from all over the world to build the best teams possible, but this trend has a price.

Cribl Reference Architecture Series: Scaling Effectively for a High Volume of Agents

In this livestream, Cribl’s Ahmed Kira and I explore the challenges of scaling your Cribl Stream architecture to accommodate a large number of agents, providing valuable insights on what you need to consider when expanding your Cribl Stream deployment. Managing data flows from a high volume of agents presents a unique set of challenges that need to be addressed.

Class is in Session with The Observability Professor!

Please join the Observability Professor, Perry Correll, and Ed Bailey as they kick off a series of live streams about the magic and challenges of observability. In this session, Perry and Ed will talk about the foundational aspects of what is observability and its value to an enterprise. In later sessions, they will talk about steps for better telemetry from your applications and logs and how to use that data to help your business achieve clear insights into your application and customer behavior. It will be a fun and interesting discussion!

Reference Architecture Series: Scaling Syslog

In this livestream, Cribl’s Ahmed Kira and I go into more detail about the Cribl Stream Reference Architecture, with a focus on scaling syslog. They share a few use cases, some guidelines for handling high-volume UDP and TCP syslog traffic, and talk about the pros and cons of some of the different approaches to tackling this challenge. It’s also available on our podcast feed if you want to listen on the go.

A Journey to Observability: Following Your Data From Generation to Analysis

I’m launching a new Observability Series called the Observability Professor, and it is designed to cover some common topics and terms in a vendor agnostic way. That’s right, no marketing! So what’s special, what’s new, what’s it going to cover that everyone else in the industry missed? Background: There are endless amounts of blogs, papers, and books on Observability; what it is and what it offers.

Building a Scripted Event Collector With Cribl Stream

Cribl Stream provides a robust HTTP REST collector, with many features and options. Still, there are endless combinations that vendors can provide in their API endpoints. Sometimes you may need to take more extreme measures to unlock data stashed begin the API entry point. No worries! Cribl also allows you to run a script to collect that data, and can even help you scale it. In this blog post, we’ll cover how I completed this task for a recent interaction using Qualys.

You've Goat-to Be Kidding Me: Cracking the Code of Installing the Microsoft Sentinel AMA and CEF Collector without Cribl

As a wise man once said, never ask a goat to install software, they’ll just end up eating the instructions. It may appear that the pesky goats have eaten some of those instructions or eaten too many sticker bushes to keep up with recent Microsoft Sentinel changes if you’ve tried configuring the CEF and Azure Connected Machine Agents. This guide is for you whether you have spent considerable time trying to get these agents to work or just dabbling in the Sentinel waters!

The Fatal Unconnectedness of Incumbents from Customers: The Tale of a Race Against the Clock

This tale is based on an actual event that happened to one of our Cribl Search customers. It highlights a massive gap between the urgent needs of modern businesses and the outdated, draconian terms dictated by traditional SIEM vendors. While the events are real, a touch of dramatization was added for the fun of it. Why not?