Advancing Data Observability with Cribl’s Nick Heudecker

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

I'm happy to be joined by Nick UD Decker, senior Director, market Strategy and Competitive Intelligence at Cribble. Nick's been on Techron TV a few times. I don't know if you'll remember him, but he always brings the, some good information and good, good, uh, conversation to our show.

Hey, Nick, welcome. Good to see you again. Thanks for having me.

It's been a while. Yes, it, it really adds. We, you know, things have been busy and things have been moving along.

Um, Nick, let's start with you, if you don't mind, people out here saying, okay, he's got a nice title, market strategy and competitive intelligence senior director. What exactly does that mean and how'd you get there? Uh, so what, what does that mean first?

Um, so basically my team runs, um, analyst relations, competitive intelligence, that kind of on the tin. Uh, we do a lot of evangelism work, uh, thought leadership content, uh, sales enablement, basically. We have, my team's got the best job I think, in the company.

We get to float around, uh, and kind of help everybody. We interact with customers, we interact with, uh, influencers. It's a, it's a really fun job.

Um, as far as how I got here, uh, prior to Kble, I've been here for just over three and a half years, so it's been a long time. Uh, I've seen the company grow from a very small startup to a global footprint today. Um, so I've been here for three and a half years.

Uh, prior to Ribble I spent about eight years at Gartner as an analyst covering the data and analytics market. Um, and that's how I met the co-founders of Ribble. Uh, they were at Splunk at the time.

Uh, I was introduced to them when they were working on the Hunk project. I don't know if you remember that, that's goes way back. Sure.

Um, so that's how I met them. And, uh, during the pandemic, I got the itch to go build something again, reached out to Clint and, uh, the CEO and, and here I am. Excellent.

Love it. Love it. Um, and you know what, I guess there are people out here who know cri, who know crile, but there's a lot of people out here who may not or just think they know Crile.

How would you describe crile and what you guys are doing? Well, we've, we vaulted a lot. Um, you know, or our, our flagship product was, or, or, or still is, Crile Stream.

And, you know, we've extended that product portfolio to, uh, Crile, search, cripple Edge, as well as Cripple Lake. So now we, we've really created this, I think I refer to it as a, as the decomposed data infrastructure or IT and security more formally. We call it a data engine for IT and security.

Very. So we've always felt that like, yeah, I mean it, and it's, it's been really well received, but there's always been, well, IT and security personas, their data needs have always been kind of under met, right? There haven't been tools built for them to deal with huge amounts of data, data all over the place.

And so we see that as our opportunity to kind of, to meet that need for that underserved audience. Very good. So, uh, the different, you know, product lines that you mentioned, the newest one, I believe is this Cribble Lake, and we had a recent announcement around Cribble Lake.

Why don't, if you don't mind, take us through that. So Crile Lake is the most recent addition to the Crile Brock portfolio, as you mentioned. And we saw a need for our customers to just make it easier to store a large amount of data, whether that's in, uh, Amazon, S3, Azure Blob Store, et cetera.

And it, it sounds, it sounds kind of counterintuitive, right? Like how hard is it to set up an S3 bucket? Well, if it's just you, it's not hard.

But if you're a large organization and we work with some of the biggest companies in the world, everyone has to go ask like a central infrastructure team or a cloud management team to have those buckets allocated. And so they've gotta check, you know, make sure that IAM roles are correct and all the other permissions are correct, and that, you know, what is that bucket being used for? Some of the customers that I've spoken with before Cripple Lake, they were waiting six or eight weeks to have an S3 bucket or an Azure law bucket allocated.

So in the meantime, there's nothing they can do. They're waiting, they're out of control. So with Cripple Lake, we saw an opportunity to really accelerate that and make that a lot easier to make that storage accessible, and then also offer an opinionated way for how we want that data to be stored and partitioned in those buckets to make it easier and faster, or our customers and our own other tools like crile Search to access that data in a very fluent fast way.

Does that make sense? Absolutely. I mean, you know, we, we're, we're seeing that, I mean, it, it's a crazy time 'cause for so long, so I always believe technology works in adjusting time way, right?

Ads, ads, Moore's law would take hold and our processors would get more powerful. We'd come up with apps that demanded that kind of horsepower. And as our apps threw off or required more data, the way we stored data and the price of storing data would, would, um, you know, correspond, make, enable that, right?

So, you know, a top of the line PC was always somewhere between 2,505 grand, and it probably still is. And data, you know, you get a lot more for your money today, but you need a lot more for your money. Yeah.

Today when it comes to data storage and stuff like that, now our ability to, you want to call it observe, I call it analyze better, maybe our ability to get our hands around these big data, you know, uh, lakes that we have out there has also kept up in a just in time way, right? Having all that data without being able to analyze it profitably, pro not profit well profitably, but properly is kind of a waste. But it didn't make sense to kind of develop that capability until you had that big data and you had a way to, to combine it.

So the whole thing is pretty, pretty cool. Um, we're, and you know, we're seeing, talk about the data, a aspect of it, you know, IDC has data out there and that, uh, data's growing 28% a year. Um, and that's a staggering amount.

And with it budgets only growing between five and 7%. Like how do you, how do you make up that difference? So you need to have, you need to have the option to make better choices for all this stuff that you're collecting.

You know, how can you analyze it? How can you just store it for compliance needs? You may land terabytes of data a day and honestly, never touch it until it ages out, but you still have to have it.

And so just having accessible options for our users has been key. I, I agree. Now, certainly Nick, over the last three, four years, observability, well, so first of all, observability has become a loaded word somewhat, right?

Things that race to call like 8:00 PM m application performance mar monitoring or management have now are now called observability, uh, observability from a security point of view, right? Has subsumed a lot of sourcing and all of these things. Um, you know, observability is real, certainly, but it, it's a loaded word.

Uh, I think like every other new word, new term, new concept, it takes a little bit of time for the market to solidify, like, to ingest these things, spit 'em back out as something that everybody recognizes. I think we kind of hit that area and observability people now understand a little bit more when we talk about observability and we're seeing, you know, things like, you know, how does it work with the data lake? And we need a data lake in order to have that, you know, uh, critical mass of data that you need to really make observability work for you.

Um, where do you see the market on this? Where do you see it evolving? Am I being too optimistic?

Do I live in an observability bowl bubble? I don't know. Um, I think the jury's still out, honestly.

Like we've seen observability get sprinkled around quite a bit, right? You mentioned a PM, now it's a PM and observability, and that umbrella continues to grow. Now there's digital experience management as part of that overall offering.

There's network observability, ai, and model observability, data observability. So it, the, while the word is being sprinkled around quite a bit, I don't think technology buyers really know what kind of ROI they're getting. Right?

You know, how is it, and, and vendors need to be better about saying, you know, how is this different from what came before? And you see a lot of observability washing. There are certain companies out there that haven't made any changes to their products whatsoever, but they now say that they are an observability vendor for product X or industry Y.

And so I, I, I don't know, I disagree with you a little bit. I still think there's some maturity that has to happen. It will happen, but you may need to start to see a pullback from the word observability, right?

We're seeing that certainly from some vendors already. Uh, we're seeing it, uh, definitely from some buyer personas, right? They just don't know what it is, what they're gonna get out of it.

There's still a lot of work to do. Agreed. Interesting stuff.

Um, Nick, we only have a few minutes left. I, I wanted to turn a little bit to the practical here. People who may be interested in checking out Crile Lake.

Yeah. Works. Thank you for a test spin.

Um, how, how did, what, what's the best on-ramp here? Uh, we made it really easy, uh, like with all of our products. Uh, so you can go to cribble Cloud, sign up for an account that's C-R-I-B-L-D-R-I-B-L, yes.

Uh, cloud, Cribble cloud. Sign up for an account. You can go through our tutorial sandboxes.

Um, there is no requested demo button on our website. You can just go use the product. Um, and so there's a free tier for every product that we offer.

Uh, so for Cripple Stream, that's a free terabyte a day that never times out. Uh, and then in the case of Ribble Lake, you can store 50 gigabytes free, uh, in Cripple Lake and experiment with that. You can replay data from lake through stream to any other destination.

Uh, so if you wanna send that data onto your a PM tool of choice, your Amazon Security Lake in OCSF format, you can totally do that. Uh, and you can also play around Cripple Edge, which is our agent footprint as well. cloud, check it out.

Uh, you can also find me in the community. I'm Nick h in the Cribble community, slack. Go to cribble DO io slash community.

Uh, you'll find an eager group of about 7,000 people. Uh, happy to help answer your questions. I love it.

That's fantastic. io. That's correct.

Yeah. Okay. Wanna make sure.

So we got Cribble io, cribble Cloud, and it is C-R-I-B-L. Hey Nick, man, I want thank you for coming on and, and enlightening us a little bit today. Keep up the great work there at cribble.

You guys gonna be at RSA by the way, or? No? We will definitely at RSA.

My whole team will be there. Uh, our executive team will be there, so if you wanna stop by and chat, you definitely find our booth. Uh, unfortunately, I don't know what the number is off the top of my head.

Um, it's okay. It should, it's a small show floor, I'm sure. We'll zero around.

Yeah. Tiny Todd. It's gonna be like, yeah, just to handle, actually I'll make it easy where our broadcast Ali, all week broadcasting live.

Stop by and say hi. I definitely will. I definitely will.

My Cody West broadcast alley, first floor, right by the keynote stake there. Perfect. All right, Nick.

Fantastic. Best of luck to all my friends at Crile. We'll be in touch.