Technically speaking, observability offers visibility into the data being generated by your infrastructure devices, systems, and applications — but in reality, it offers the opportunity to see what’s happening, There’s no guarantee that you’ll get what you want; you have to set things up in a way that makes it possible for you to get the insights you need.
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the origins of observability and why you need it. In this blog (Part 2), we will cover exactly what observability is, what it isn’t, and how to get started. Before we can dive into how to approach observability, let’s get one thing clear: You can’t buy a one-size-fits-all observability solution.
In this post, we’ll discuss two functions in the Cribl Stream arsenal: The Aggregations function, which allows you to perform stats and metrics collection in flight, and the Chain function allows you to call one Pipeline from within another. The event flow will continue when the Chained Pipeline returns. To demonstrate their use, we’ll answer this question: How long did it take for Cribl to process events using your pipeline?
With its market size reaching more than $2 billion in 2020, you’d think that a universal definition of the term observability would have emerged by now. But it turns out that a clear definition of a term or industry isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for the rapid growth of its market size — just ask everyone at your next dinner party to define blockchain for you and see how many different answers you get!
The best part of my job is talking with prospects and customers about their logging and data practices while explaining how Cribl focuses on getting more value from observability data. I love to talk about everything they are doing and hope to accomplish so I can get a sense of the end state. That is vital to developing solutions that provide overall value across the enterprise and not just a narrow tactical win with limited impact.
A SIEM (Security Information Event Management) platform, along with several other tools that make you crave Alphabet Soup (XDR, UBA, NDR, etc), is a critical component of any organization’s security infrastructure. Between a constantly growing volume of logs, increasing attacks and breaches, and challenges finding qualified staff, many organizations may consider a SIEM migration. There could be several reasons for this.
“Why is it so bad right now? Why does it seem like we’re fighting this up-hill battle?” The internet, it seems, is having a mid-life crisis. As industries progress through their life cycle, they are expected to reach a quasi-steady state of maturity, but the internet hasn’t gotten that message. In fact, it seems to be stuck in the growth phase, expanding exponentially with no end in sight, and securing it just feels so hard. Let’s dive into my Black Hat recap.
If you asked your engineering team how well they can handle all of the security and observability data they’re managing, would you get a resounding “Yeah boss, we’re good to go!” in response? Possible, but unlikely. Chances are they feel like they’re stuck on a boat that’s taking on water, spending their day using tiny buckets to scoop some of it out, with no way to plug any of the leaks.
We’ve reached the point in the DevOps transformation where efficiency and automation are no longer the highest objectives. The next step is engineering past automation and towards fully autonomous, self-healing systems. If you aren’t conversing about building this type of resilience into your systems and applications, there’s never been a better time than now to start.
It’s time for the Black Hat conference in the United States, so we’re onsite meeting with customers and prospects looking to untangle their data from the grip of vendors holding their data hostage. We aim to start a rebellion against this lock-in and encourage customers to focus on radical choice and control with their observability data. Pushing back against “The Empire” is challenging, but you can achieve it with Cribl Stream and Edge.
