Cribl expects Edge and its’ next-gen Edge capabilities to be sold with the flagship Cribl Stream, but notes that its ability to either enhance or replace existing agents is an asset, and that a component within Edge, Appscope v1.0, is being open sourced.
Clint Sharp, Cribl’s CEO and Co-Founder
Today, San Francisco-based open observability pipeline provider Cribl is launching Cribl Edge, a next-generation agent that lets organizations auto-discover and centrally control mission critical telemetry data for incorporation into analytics systems. Edge distributes Cribl’s observability pipeline technology all the way to the edge, which is what allows data there to be centrally managed and auto-discovered, something that existing technology does not do.
“We finished up last year growing over 300%, and are continuing to see a growth in momentum,” said Clint Sharp, Cribl’s CEO and Co-Founder.
Cribl Stream, initially called Logstream, was Cribl’s original observability product line.
“Cribl Edge is now our second product, and there are more coming,” Sharp indicated.
There are lots of agents on the market, but Cribl sees major advantages to customers in Cribl Edge, whose competitors tend to be much older.
“We consider the edge differently, to include servers, laptops and other endpoints, rather than consider edge simply as an IoT company would,” Sharp indicated. “So the products we replace are part of another vendor’s suite – vendors like Splunk. We provide better management technology than they do. Most of these companies have older management technology. Some of them don’t have any.”
A market-first new management capability is the ability of Cribl Edge that enables operations teams to discover relevant telemetry hidden in unknown and legacy applications that have limited tooling.
Sharp also emphasized that Cribl Edge is not designed just to replace other agents, although it can be used for that if the customer wants,
“The Edge streaming product complements your existing agents, like Fluentd,” he said. “The way that we sell it is you point your agents at us and we provide additional value. If you want to point further left, you can reduce the number of agents you use – but you don’t have to. We provide the customer with full choice there.”
Appscope v1.0 is a component within Cribl Edge that Cribl is donating to the open source community.
“Appscope is a component within Edge that enables us to get high fidelity,” Sharp noted. “We hope that AppScope will gain traction in the open source community. It’s very complex technology, It’s hard engineering, and we wanted to get it read. We will be making more investments in growing that community before next year.”
Sharp acknowledged that Cribl Stream will remain the core Cribl product, and that Cribl Edge will be an add-on to that.
“It’s an expansion play for us,” he said. “Cribl customers will start with Stream. It’s the easiest to get running, while rolling out a new agent is kind of a longer-term product. We have had phenomenal success with our channel first strategy, but most partners will continue to lead with Stream, and it will continue to be the one to land customers.”
Sharp indicated that the channel is continuing to grow.
“Over 70% of business now has a channel partner attached, which is high for the observability space,” he said. “We have over 100 partners but focus on 10-20 closely with things like joint business plans. There are now four people in [Vice President of Global Channels] Zac Kilpatrick’s group. We continue to invest heavily in channel partners and are interested in hearing from potential new ones.
“We have everything from traditional VARS, including boutique VARs to service delivery partners, and tech partners who we partner with in the field. We don’t do a ton of business with the bigger VARs, but we sell a lot through large ones like Optiv.”
