These docs are for Cribl Edge 4.8 and are no longer actively maintained.
See the latest version (4.13).
Destinations
Cribl Edge can send data to various Destinations, including Cribl HTTP, Cribl TCP, Kafka, Kinesis, InfluxDB, Grafana Cloud, TCP JSON, Splunk, and others. Destinations can write data to either IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.
Destination Types
Destinations can be divided into streaming and non-streaming: those that accept events in real time, and those that batch them from a staging directory.
Some Destinations are Filesystem-based, which means they receive files on disk from a staging directory and batch them in a queue. When a batch of events is ready for transmission, Cribl Edge closes the file, optionally compresses it, and transmits the file to the downstream service. Filesystem-based Destinations do not support persistent queues.
Certain Destinations offer built-in load-balancing capabilities.
Internal Destinations are special-purpose Destinations that route data within your Cribl Edge deployment, or among Edge Nodes across distributed or hybrid Cribl.Cloud deployments.
Streaming and Non-Streaming Destinations
Streaming and non-streaming Destination differ in the way they receive events:
- Streaming Destinations accept events in real time.
- Non-streaming Destinations receive events in batches from a staging directory.
With non-streaming Destinations, Cribl Edge uses a staging directory in the local filesystem to format and write outputted events before sending them to configured Destinations. Once the data meets a set of conditions, Cribl Edge compresses it and moves it to the targeted Destination.
To reduce costs when the staging directory is also the final directory, Cribl Edge avoids iterating through all the files within a directory by keeping an inventory of open (in progress) files in the staging directory’s root. At startup, Cribl Edge will check for any leftover files in progress from prior sessions, and will ensure that they’re moved to their final Destination. The process of moving to the final Destination is delayed after startup (default delay: 30 seconds). Processing of these files is paced at one file per service period (which defaults to 1 second).
In Cribl.Cloud, using a staging directory is only available on hybrid, customer-managed Edge Nodes.
Batching Conditions
In non-streaming delivery, a file is closed and rolled out when it reaches its configured maximum:
- Size
- Open time
- Idle time
If a new file needs to be open, Cribl Edge will enforce the maximum number of open files by closing files in the order in which they were opened.
Data Delivery to Unreachable Destinations
Cribl Edge attempts to deliver data to all Destinations that are configured to receive it at least once. When a Destination is unreachable, there are three possible behaviors:
- Block - Cribl Edge will block incoming events.
- Drop - Cribl Edge will drop events addressed to that Destination.
- Queue - To prevent data loss, Cribl Edge will write events to a persistent queue disk buffer, then forward them when a Destination becomes available. (Available on several streaming Destinations.)
For further information about backpressure (a situation when a Destination receives more data than it can send), see Destination Backpressure Triggers.
You can configure your desired behavior through a Destination’s Backpressure Behavior drop-down. Where other options are not displayed, Cribl Edge’s default behavior is Block. For details about all the above behaviors and options, see Persistent Queues.
Available Destinations
Cribl Edge supports the following Destinations. You can configure proxy servers for all HTTP-based Destinations.
| Destination | Protocol | Streaming | Filesystem-Based | Load-Balanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 Compatible Stores | HTTP/S | Non-streaming | ✓ | |
| Amazon CloudWatch Logs | HTTP/S | Non-streaming | ✓ | |
| Data Lakes > Amazon S3 | HTTPS only | Non-Streaming | ✓ | |
| Data Lakes > Amazon Security Lake | HTTP/S | Non-Streaming | ✓ | |
| Amazon Kinesis Data Streams | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Amazon MSK | TCP | Streaming | ||
| Amazon SQS | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Azure Blob Storage | HTTPS only | Non-Streaming | ✓ | |
| Azure Data Explorer | HTTPS only | Streaming or non-streaming | ||
| Azure Event Hubs | TCP | Streaming | ||
| Azure Monitor Logs | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Microsoft Sentinel | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Confluent Cloud | TCP | Streaming | ||
| CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Datadog | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Elastic Cloud | HTTPS only | Streaming | ✓ | |
| Elasticsearch | HTTP/S | Streaming | ✓ | |
| Exabeam | HTTP/S | Non-Streaming | ✓ | |
| Filesystem/NFS | Non-Streaming | ✓ | ||
| Google Cloud Logging | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Google Cloud Storage | HTTPS only | Non-Streaming | ✓ | |
| Google SecOps | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Grafana Cloud | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Graphite | TCP or UDP | Streaming | ||
| Honeycomb | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| InfluxDB | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Kafka | TCP | Streaming | ||
| Loki | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| MinIO | HTTP/S | Non-Streaming | ✓ | |
| NetFlow | UDP | Streaming | ||
| New Relic Events | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| New Relic Logs & Metrics | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| OpenTelemetry (OTel) | gRPC or HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Prometheus | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| SentinelOne DataSet | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| ServiceNow Cloud Observability | gRPC or HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| SignalFx | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| SNMP Trap | UDP | Streaming | ||
| Splunk HEC | HTTP/S | Streaming | ✓ | |
| Splunk Load Balanced | TCP | Streaming | ✓ | |
| Splunk Single Instance | TCP | Streaming | ||
| StatsD Extended | TCP or UDP | Streaming | ||
| StatsD | TCP or UDP | Streaming | ||
| Sumo Logic | HTTP/S | Streaming | ||
| Syslog | TCP or UDP | Streaming | ✓ (TCP only) | |
| TCP JSON | TCP | Streaming | ✓ | |
| Wavefront | HTTPS only | Streaming | ||
| Webhook | HTTP/S | Streaming | ✓ |
You can adapt the Amazon S3 Compatible Stores Destination to send data to downstream services like Databricks and Snowflake, for which Cribl Edge currently has no preconfigured Destination. For details, please contact Cribl Support.
Available Internal Destinations
- Default: Specify a default output from among your configured Destinations.
- Output Router: A “meta-Destination.” Configure rules that route data to multiple configured Destinations.
- DevNull: Simply drops events. Preconfigured and active when you install Cribl Edge, so it requires no configuration. Useful for testing.
- Cribl HTTP: Send data among peer Edge Nodes over HTTP. Streaming and load-balanced.
- Cribl TCP: Send data among peer Edge Nodes over TCP. Streaming and load-balanced.
- SpaceOut: This experimental Destination is undocumented. Be careful!