OK, first things first. I have to admit that I am, first and foremost, an old-school UNIX systems administrator. I’m that grizzled sysadmin in your shop who soliloquizes wistfully about managing UUCP for email “back in the day.” Centralizing Logs? Yeah, we had syslog, and saved it all off to compressed files.

Has this ever happened to you: ‘I have too many agents to help me collect data for processing into separate SIEMs. It’s a pain to make any changes to their configuration!’ Or perhaps this one: ‘I have a large kubernetes deployment, but I just can’t seem to get metrics and logs out of it and into my SIEM or TSDB!’ Fear not, weary administrators, Cribl Edge is here!

Last week, Cribl launched the latest component of its observability architecture: Cribl Edge. ICYMI, Cribl Edge is a next generation observability data collector that greatly simplifies gathering your metrics, events, and logs. Edge incorporates all of the capabilities of Cribl Stream’s workers, allowing you to route, redact, filter, and enrich data directly from the source. Why is this important?

Today, Cribl is celebrating two significant milestones that are incredibly special to our founders and the entire company. Yesterday, Cribl celebrated its fifth anniversary, a day also shared with Clint’s son’s birthday. While we’re sure there was much celebrating (and cake!), it really earmarked the day our founders decided that building innovative software to help solve technology professionals’ most pressing problems was only going to happen if they were driving it.

Yesterday, we officially announced Cribl Edge, a next-generation observability agent. You can find more about its features here. In this post, I am going to walk you through the journey of incepting and building this new product. Our most important core value at Cribl is “Customers First, Always.” and that involves actively listening and being on the lookout for any pains our customers might be experiencing.

It’s been a busy Winter at Cribl! Today we are officially announcing Cribl Edge, a next-generation agent that expands the scope of observability. In Edge, we’ve taken the very concept of “agent” and given it a Cribl power-up by taking our best-in-class observability pipeline technology built into Cribl Stream and moving it all the way out to edge systems.

In 2022, administrators are still managing agents which collect data for observability and security the same way they did 15 years ago: typing in configuration files by hand. A lot has changed since 2006 when Amazon announced AWS. Instead of racking and stacking servers in data centers, we’re spinning up compute resources in a variety of forms – at the click of a button, or automatically through APIs.

We’ve come a long way in a short time and that is thanks to you, our customers. Cribl set out to listen to our customers and use that to guide us forward. Today we’re announcing Cribl Edge, a next generation agent designed to to scale your most precious commodity; you. We’re also announcing a name change to the product formally known as LogStream. Now, as with all our releases, it doesn’t stop there. We have some upgrades that all go towards allowing you to scale.

We’re well into 2022, and it’s full steam ahead addressing challenges and moving IT and SRE projects to completion. Are you ready for the challenges ahead of you? Do you feel prepared to handle the work you know about…and the work that’s sure to come your way? Are you ready for the end-of-the-year budget planning process that will be here before you know it? To help, I’d like to share my learnings from 20+ years in IT.

This is one of a series of blogs in which we introduce AppScope 1.0 with stories that demonstrate how AppScope changes the game for SREs and developers, as well as Infosec, DevSecOps, and ITOps practitioners. In the coming weeks, Part 2 of this post will tackle another Infosec use case. If you’re in Infosec, at some point you’ve doubtless had to vet an application before it’s allowed to run in an enterprise environment.

SREs and Devs are used to solving problems even when an awkward or inefficient way is the only way. In AppScope 1.0, SREs and Devs have a new alternative to standard methods, that the AppScope team thinks will make that problem-solving a lot more fun. We in the AppScope team constantly hear firsthand about life in the SRE trenches. For this blog, we “interview” a fictional SRE/Dev whose thoughts and comments are a mash-up of things we’ve heard from real people we know.

Talk to anyone in the tech space and you’ll likely hear horror stories of how home lab setups can grow out of control or about long lists of VMs used to test various software systems. As a Criblanian, I’m no exception – I have at least a half dozen instances of Cribl LogStream deployed everywhere from my local machine, on docker containers, or on a few EC2 instances in AWS.

Imagine a workflow where you change and test all of your configurations in the “development” environment, committing those changes along the way, and then when you’re happy with the changes, you bundle them together in a single “pull request”, and the changes, after being reviewed by your peer(s), get pushed into production.

Since joining Cribl in July, I’ve had frequent conversations with Federal teams about observability data they collect from networks and systems, and how they use and retain this data in their SIEM tool(s). Cribl LogStream’s ability to route, shape, reduce, enrich, and replay data can play an invaluable role for Federal Agencies. Over several blogs, we will walk through the power that we bring to these requirements.