Cribl, a data observability platform utilized by Accenture, Domino’s, and 7-Eleven, has secured $150 million in a Series D fundraising round. The hike comes as remote work has become a semi-permanent way of life for millions of employees across the world, and a “decentralized” workforce may make managing IT systems and data scattered across various locations more difficult for businesses.
According to Cribl’s cofounder and CEO Clint Sharp, ‘Enterprises have no efficient method to make use of all that data and are getting crushed by the cost of trying.’ When you consider the numerous digital transformation initiatives that businesses are pursuing, as well as the rising requirement to communicate with consumers through a software-powered interface, it’s evident that businesses will need to discover ways to ensure little friction and maximum uptime.
“Today, almost every business is a ‘software business’ – whether you’re a bank or a shop, software applications are now a fundamental way businesses communicate with their consumers, and if businesses don’t give a terrific experience on those apps, customers will go elsewhere,” Sharp said.
Visibility into Cribl’s systems
But where does Cribl fit into this? Cribl operates in the “observability” space, which is concerned with providing companies with visibility into their systems, including details of specific customer interactions such as when they opened an app, what menu options they selected, and whether they encountered any errors along the way. It’s all about gaining real-time insights into an application’s internal condition by monitoring a large amount of telemetry data.
Cribl, which was founded in 2017 and is based in San Francisco, offers four primary products: AppScope, Cribl.Cloud, Cribl Edge, and the star of the show, Cribl Stream, which is described as an “observability pipeline” for moving observability data between any source and destination.
Big-name incumbents like Splunk, Snowflake, and Elastic are part of the larger observability sphere. Rather than directly competing with these systems, it connects with them, allowing organizations to receive logs, data, and traces from any source. The most direct competitors, according to Sharp, are open-source “build-your-own” solutions like Kafka or FluentD, with its key USP being a “vendor-agnostic” approach that allows enterprises to migrate all of their machine data.
“A common complaint we hear from our IT and security customers is that they’re utilizing a lot of technologies across their activities, with data flowing in and out of all of them,” Sharp added. “This adds to the complexity and wastes a lot of money.” By design, Cribl’s products are open and interoperable, allowing businesses to connect different portions of the data ecosystem and gain control over all event data that passes through their corporate IT systems.”
Decentralized Network
Cribl has added a fifth product to the mix with the launch of Cribl Search, which allows businesses to execute “search-in-place” queries right where the data is created, rather than having to ingest and centralize it all first. This has significant implications for real-time data access, particularly for security teams wishing to use rapid telemetry data to “remove blind spots.”
This is also in line with a growing trend in the data infrastructure arena, where firms are increasingly favoring decentralized data platforms over centralized data platforms. The more different systems in a company’s stock, however, the more difficult it is to glean insights from the data they generate.
The possibilities for how a corporation could employ Cribl search are numerous. Each day, a corporation with hundreds of Kubernetes instances supporting a variety of applications can create gigabytes of telemetry data. The time it takes to move all of that data into a consolidated repository for further analysis and troubleshooting can mean the difference between gaining and losing clients. Cribl Search takes all of this digging to the data’s source, allowing users to search against data stored in Splunk, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch.
Furthermore, users can search through data as it travels via Cribl Stream or when it is stored “at rest” in what Cribl refers to as an “observability lake,” which is essentially a data lake for log data.
“Traditionally, the only method to debug an application that is performing poorly or encountering faults is to forward the information and store it centrally,” Sharp explained. “This adds unneeded complication to the process of resolving the performance problem.” You may debug immediately on the edge with Cribl Search, without needing to relocate data first.”
Cribl has previously received $252 million, and with an additional $150 million in the bank, the firm is well-funded to develop up Cribl Search and prepare it for a public debut – the product is now available in private beta as part of an early access program.
Cribl’s latest series D investment now values the company at $2.5 billion, according to a person close to the deal, up from the $1 billion valuations it announced in its $200 million Series C round less than a year ago. Tiger Global Management led Cribl’s series D financing, which included Sequoia, Greylock, Redpoint Ventures, IVP, and CRV.
