How to debug REST Collector APIs with Cribl REST Collector Diagnostics

This video introduces the new REST Collector Diagnostics feature in Cribl, which helps you troubleshoot API collection issues faster. It’s designed for observability and data engineers who use REST Collector to pull data from external APIs and need deeper visibility into HTTP requests, responses, and errors.

You’ll see how to run collectors in debug mode, inspect HTTP status codes, request and response headers, and understand why an API that used to work is now failing—whether that’s a 400 Bad Request during authentication, rate limiting from a third-party API, or data not coming back as expected.
The demo also shows how REST Collector diagnostics generates equivalent curl commands (with sensitive tokens safely redacted) so you can continue debugging in curl or tools like Postman.

In this walkthrough, you’ll learn how to:

• Troubleshoot a REST Collector job that runs but captures no events by inspecting diagnostics instead of raw logs.
• Use the new debug option to quickly surface HTTP errors and authentication problems, including 400 Bad Request responses.
• Understand each phase of a REST Collector job (discovery and collection) and drill into diagnostics at every step.
• Identify rate limiting behavior when calling third-party APIs and see how retries are handled.
• Copy and adapt generated curl commands for deeper API debugging and importing into Postman, with configurable redaction for tokens and other sensitive fields.

If you rely on REST Collector for API-based data collection, REST Collector Diagnostics can save you time, reduce guesswork, and give you a clearer path from “no events captured” to a working, observable data flow.

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