Let me set the record straight before anyone accuses me of bias or not being an OpenTelemetry supporter. Cribl loves OpenTelemetry! We’ve written lots of blogs about It; we have vendor-specific OpenTelemetry Destinations (with more to come!), and we support automatic batch parsing for easier data manipulation and re-batching for network transport efficiency of logs, metrics, and traces.

As we wrap up an incredible year, it’s the perfect time to celebrate Cribl’s progress and innovation in 2024! This year brought many exciting features designed to solve real-world problems and make life easier for our customers. In the spirit of reflection and festivity, I’ll highlight twelve game-changing product features, releases, and enhancements— each a testament to listening, learning, and delivering value to you, our users.

Ever wondered how many NetFlow exporters or edge routers you have configured on your core switches? What if I told you that every exporter uses ~0.2% bandwidth in overhead? While that may not seem like much (and it has been a few years since most network engineers were worried about CPU overhead for NetFlow exports), older hardware and network OS versions may be more sensitive to having multiple flow exporters configured.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed some interesting trends in my work with state and local governments. Across my conversations with organizations in this space, there’s a common thread: teams are getting creative about maximizing their limited resources. With budgets either flat or shrinking and operational demands increasing, these teams face tough choices. They’re being asked to maintain or improve services while working with the same, or in some cases, fewer resources than before.

In today’s data-driven world, ensuring the security and compliance of your data pipelines is paramount. Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge offer powerful telemetry data management and enrichment solutions. However, deploying these tools within your environment often requires careful consideration of security and compliance standards.

If you are familiar with Cribl’s solutions, you know that we offer our customers choice and control over their data. The entire company is built on the idea that we want to help you get your data from anywhere to anywhere using open standards and open data formats. It is your data, and you have full control over what you collect and how it is handled.

Cribl Edge can send data to OpenTelemetry in several different ways. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the OpenTelemetry Metrics. In the blog, we’ll talk about Cribl Edge, but what we say applies to Cribl Stream, too! We will cover how to use Cribl Edge to collect Linux System Metrics, transform them into the OTLP Metrics format, and deliver them to an OTLP Destination.

Cybersecurity is moving fast, and if your security data management strategy can’t keep up with your growth, you’re already behind. Security operations centers (SOCs) today face mountains of data spread across countless tools and platforms. Combine that with evolving cyber threats, and you have an environment that demands a smarter approach to SIEM data management.

Recently, I have seen a trend of enterprises moving toward OpenTelemetry (OTel) for application tracing. Tail sampling, in particular, has emerged as a preferred approach to gain actionable insights while balancing data volume and cost. OpenTelemetry offers developers and practitioners the ability to instrument their code with open-source tools, moving away from vendor-provided tools for application instrumentation.

We’ve been steadily building strong momentum with Microsoft over the past year, and the latest step forward is a significant one: Cribl solutions are now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. But why this focus on Microsoft Azure? The answer lies in what customers are prioritizing and discussing with us.