UPDATED 09:00 EST / AUGUST 25 2021

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Cribl raises $200M to simplify how enterprises monitor their IT infrastructure

Startup Cribl Inc., which helps organizations such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory find technical issues in their technology infrastructure, today announced that it has closed a $200 million funding round.

Greylock and Redpoint Ventures led the round. They were joined by publicly traded cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike Inc., IVP, Sequoia, CRV and Citi Ventures.

Organizations continuously monitor their applications, servers and other technology systems to spot technical issues. They typically use multiple tools for the task. A company might have one software tool that monitors its cloud instances, another that tracks its on-premises workloads and a third solution responsible for detecting cyberattacks. Some enterprises use an even larger number of products to help them spot issues.

Monitoring tools detect technical problems by collecting and analyzing large amounts of data from a company’s infrastructure. For example, a tool that tracks server performance might collect information about processor utilization. Before it can be analyzed, this data has to be transported from the server to the monitoring tool. 

The challenge Cribl was founded to address is that transporting data to monitoring tools frequently involves significant costs and technical obstacles. Data often can’t be processed in its raw form, for instance because it may contain erroneous records. As a result, companies must deploy additional, complex software to turn the data into a form that their monitoring tools can analyze. The more monitoring products a firm uses, the more difficult it is to manage the process of sending information to those products. 

Cribl promises to simplify the task by providing companies with a single, centralized platform for orchestrating all their monitoring-related information streams. The startup calls the platform LogStream. LogStream functions as a kind of switchboard for data: It collects information from a company’s infrastructure and distributes it to all the different tools the firm uses to find technical issues.

Another benefit Cribl promises besides simplicity is a reduction in software costs. Many monitoring tools are priced based on how much information a company processes. The more data a firm analyzes, the more expensive it becomes to perform monitoring.

LogStream helps lower monitoring costs by reducing the volume of data that organizations have to analyze to find technical issues. It does so by filtering duplicate data points and records that don’t contain any urgent information. The result is that the total amount of information companies have to import into their monitoring tools is reduced and, in conjunction, the associated software costs decline. 

LogStream also performs other data operations besides filtering unnecessary records. It can change the format of the records to make them easier to process and, if needed, enrich them with external information. Cybersecurity teams, for example, can use LogStream to enrich breach alerts generated by threat detection systems with third party threat intelligence.

According to Cribl, LogStream is capable of ingesting as much as 20 petabytes of data per day. The startup is also promising submillisecond latency, which is important for companies processing time-sensitive data that needs to be analyzed quickly. Cribl claims LogStream moves some types of information seven times more efficiently than certain competing technologies.

LogStream’s efficiency is partly the result of a unique approach to collecting monitoring data.

Monitoring tools collect data using software programs called agents that run on a company’s systems. If a company has three monitoring tools, it will usually have three agents installed on every system to collect data, one for each tool.

LogStream makes it possible to mix and match agents to let one monitoring application process data from another application’s agent. The benefit, the startup says, is simplicity.

The ability to reuse the same agent across multiple applications reduces the total number of agents that a company has to install on its systems. That means less software to maintain for administrators and also results in lower infrastructure overhead, since decreasing the number of programs installed on a system saves processing and storage capacity. 

“Enterprises today are caught between the mythical ideal of a single pane of glass for all data insights, and the harsh reality that they have to install agents everywhere they want to observe data,” said Cribl co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Clint Sharp. “There’s a better way — to create a unified data pipeline, with the same agents across security and operations, that allows enterprises to maximize the value of their existing investments.”

In addition to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, LogStream is used by Autodesk Inc., Rivian Automotive Inc. and dozens of other companies. Using the new $200 million funding round, Cribl can grow its go-to-market operation to continue expanding its customer base. 

Cribl has raised $254 million in funding to date.

Image: Cribl

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