Partner Spotlight: Gigamon and Cribl Help Customers Take Control of Their Data

San Francisco-based Cribl aims to put organizations in control of their telemetry data by offering options and flexibility for data management and observability.

With our shared goal of delivering deep observability, Gigamon and Cribl are a natural pairing. We talked to Kamilo Amir, Cribl’s Director of Technical Alliances, about the company and how Cribl and Gigamon solutions complement each other.

Gigamon: Who is Cribl, and what is the company’s history?

Kamilo: Cribl was founded in 2018 to help organizations keep up with exponential data growth by giving them choice and control of what to do with their data. Our founders have been in the observability ecosystem for a combined total of 30+ years. Throughout their careers, Clint [Sharp], Ledion [Bitincka], and Dritan [Bitincka] heard customers telling them they wanted to work with log data in motion to get the right data to the right place in the right format. They knew this called for its own fit-for-purpose solution, not another generic data movement tool. Cribl was founded with one purpose in mind: build a solution to make observability viable for any organization, giving our customers visibility and control while maximizing value from existing tools.

Gigamon: Describe your company culture. What makes you tick?

Kamilo: Of course, Cribl is a collection of individuals with diverse backgrounds, unique stories, and our own personal values. But as we come together, we want to align our company around a shared set of values. These serve as guidance to our current and future employees as to what makes Cribl, Cribl. Customers First, Always is one of our core values that we feel sets us apart from our peers. Irreverent but Serious is a value that helps us be ourselves and be able to make some great goat jokes. Being Curious helps us seek to understand problems and the people who have them before acting. Finally, we are a Transparent organization, which allows us to have a strong collaborative and Together culture.

Gigamon: If you had to describe Gigamon with just one word, what would it be?  

Kamilo: Deep — as in Gigamon gives customers a deep understanding of their environments, and this data can get unruly quickly. That is where the partnership with Cribl is a perfect fit, giving customers the choice and freedom to collect only the data they deem worthy to send into their systems of analysis and chuck the rest into an inexpensive object store for long-term retention. If they ever want to search or replay that data, Cribl can help them there, too.

Gigamon: How do you see Cribl fit together with Gigamon to solve your customers’ problems?

Kamilo: Data is growing at 28 percent CAGR, and most customers’ budgets are not growing anywhere near that pace. There are many rich data sources that are not making it to customers’ systems of analysis due to lack of people, lack of available storage, and possible license limitations. Gigamon is a great source of data, but if customers can’t onboard that data into their SIEM, they won’t see the data’s value.

Cribl allows customers control of their data and helps route and optimize it to ingesting the data into their tools. Customers can search data and transform it into the right format, making it easy to adhere to schemas such as OCSF, ECS, or CIM for downstream destinations. This gives the freedom to route relevant data to their SIEM while nonessential data goes to an object store for long-term retention.

Gigamon: What are some of your market’s specifics, advantages, and challenges when it comes to network security and visibility?

Kamilo: Network security teams face a similar challenge that we see industry-wide: too much data and the difficulty of extracting value from that data. Vendors also tend to lock these teams into proprietary platforms where they don’t have visibility into the data and cannot share it with other analytic platforms. Cribl and Gigamon help deliver choice and control to customers.

Gigamon: Which Gigamon features stand out the most and make the product outstrip its competitors?

Kamilo: Hybrid infrastructure visibility is a significant feature that sets Gigamon apart from competitors. Customers undergoing a digital transformation and building out a hybrid environment will benefit from this deep observability. 

Gigamon: What’s an anecdote that customers share when they talk about our joint solution?

Kamilo: We had a joint customer who commented that they were able to see immediate value from having Cribl collect and route data from Gigamon to their multiple data destinations. They sent only relevant data into their SIEM while sending the rest of their events into a low-cost object store.

Gigamon: What is the most memorable moment associated with Gigamon as a partner?

Kamilo: We are new to the Gigamon partner ecosystem, but our most memorable moment so far was having Mike Contreras speak at the Gigamon SKO event in Los Angeles this year. It was great being able to share how Cribl and Gigamon can work together and put together a great story around the Gigamon Observability Pipeline and beyond.

Gigamon: What are the wow moments associated with Gigamon?

Kamilo: Being a part of your 2024 SKO was a big wow moment for us. The excitement at SKO was amazing, and there was some really great energy in the room. Everyone was so welcoming, and we were honored to speak on the main stage with Gigamon Chief Product Officer Michael Dickman.

Gigamon: What are some of the new challenges you see in the market that your partnership with Gigamon can solve?

Kamilo: The explosive growth of data is not slowing down, and companies will need more data as they bring on new services and adopt hybrid environments. This partnership between Cribl and Gigamon will help customers with this growing data problem and increase their visibility and security posture while decreasing their costs and operational overhead.

Gigamon: What are the positive business outcomes as a Gigamon partner?

Kamilo: Customers have choice and control over the data that is generated by Gigamon from their infrastructure. This allows them to send their data to the right systems in the right format and helps them save on the costs associated with this large data set. Security professionals can easily collect and route their infrastructure data into their SIEM. The same data can then be collected by the application/SRE team and optimized for their IT operations tools.

Gigamon: What unique capabilities does this partnership bring to our joint business?

Kamilo: One of the unique capabilities that the partnership between Cribl and Gigamon affords is unifying the message around the observability pipeline. The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline captures raw packet information from a customer’s infrastructure and transforms it for Cribl to collect and send into systems of analysis such as a SIEM and an object store for long-term retention. The data in the object store can be explored using Cribl Search and replayed into other data solutions when the need arises.

Gigamon: Who is the target audience (such as SecOps, NetOps, or DevOps) for our joint solution, and how do they benefit?

Kamilo: Cribl tends to land in the SecOps side of the house, but our technology can easily be adopted by other teams such as DevOps and NetOps. They can all find a way to work together using Cribl to easily collect and share logs, metrics, and traces across organizations.

Gigamon: Which verticals/segments are the best target companies, or where we have seen success and why?

Kamilo: We have seen some early success with our public sector joint customers. The recent Executive Order 14028 and Memorandum 21-31 that focused on logging have driven the need for a way to properly collect data and make sure it is available for analysis. This, coupled with the adoption of a Zero Trust Architecture, has accelerated the adoption of Cribl Stream across many agencies.

Gigamon: Thank you, Kamilo, for making time for us and for being such a wonderful partner.