OFC 2018 Theme: 400 Gbps

Cribl's Fall Release Hints At Why It Just Closed a Monster Financing Round

10/12/2021

When Cribl announced its monster $200M financing round, we wondered what is coming next for the observability infrastructure company. The company has revealed some of what got investors excited in its fall release (Version 3.2.0) announcements. We think the two most important elements of the fall release announcements include is Cloud Visibility & Management and its Quick Connect features, both of which enhance Cribl customers’ implementation of the flagship product, Log S tream.
In addition to this 3.2.0 release, we think another reason investors are so enthusiastic to back Cribl is the growing demand for observability systems. We expect that, over time, the networking, security, and observability industries will see increasing overlap between each other. This overlap will drive customers to demand solid third-party alternatives to the trend where prominent players from each of the three industries acquire smaller, best-of-breed category leaders. While there is able competition in the overall Observability market, Cribl’s newfound war chest positions it to vie for leadership in the emerging observability infrastructure market.
The company’s main fall release enhancements include:

Quick Connect – connect sources to destinations with a simple, drag-and-drop interface without the need to create filters. We see Quick Connect as a GUI that reduces the time to route data between source(s) and destination(s). Cribl’s “Pack” concept, which is a pre-configured package of functions sourced from Cribl and/or its community members, can also be easily applied with a few clicks.
Cloud Visibility and Management – Central management for multiple LogStream systems from the Cloud, providing a single pane of management, data processing, and billing. We see this capability as akin to cloud-management of data networking devices like WLAN Access Points in that it allows you to keep the management plan separate from the data, and keep the data processing close to the egress point data separate from the management plane.
GitOps Workflows – the company allows you to pull and push updates from the production version of Logstream. The GitOps Workflows function allows you to develop, test and deploy more efficiently using the Git concept.
OpenTelemetry Support. Support for OpenTelemetry, which is an open-source and free collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that is in beta and should get to general availability soon. Logstream is ahead of the industry in its support.
Integrations – Logstream will soon support Crowdstrike, O365 Teams, DataDog, New Relic Ingest

The Cloud Visibility and Management function is essential because it contemplates two realities: (a) the need to centrally manage multiple LogStream systems simultaneously, and (b) the increasing need to ensure data flows through and is stored, in the places specified by the customer. The first, central management, the function should be an obvious enhancement to LogStream, for many reasons, including that most software systems are moving to the Cloud. As customers deploy LogStream more widely, managing them gets easier with central management.
The second important function of Cloud Visibility and Management is that it:

allows customers to comply with government mandates for data usage and storage,
enables customers to more ably address privacy and security concerns
empowers organizations either to move to the Cloud, maintain premises-based locations, or permutations of both, depending on various factors including cost and corporate “cloudification” objectives

Quick Connect simplifies setting up LogStream and is especially appropriate for improving the set-up experience when first using the system. We see this as a wizard that makes it easier and faster to set up LogStream. In early customer usage of this feature, it sees it most often used for fast onboarding for data routing. We’d expect this to remain the case for customers who implement the 3.2.0 release.

0 Comments

Cisco Live Event Features Observability, Network-as-a-Service, SASE

3/30/2021

0 Comments

Cisco's customer event, Cisco Live (virtual), is underway, and the company made many announcements. We are emphasizing what we think are the most relevant, which include Observability capabilities, Network as a Service (NaaS), and SASE. Here is a rundown of what we learned about today.

Core portfolio (includes Campus Ethernet Switches, Wireless LAN).

Observability. DNA Advantage and Premier customers will now be able to run the ThousandEyes agent natively on their Catalyst 9300/9400 switches and will receive access to ThousandEyes Internet and cloud intelligence at no additional cost. ThousandEyes Internet and cloud intelligence data is being incorporated into AppDynamics Dash Studio, AppDynamics’ next-gen dashboarding experience.. Cisco executive, Todd Nightingale, elaborated that the Thousand Eyes acquisition has been integrated into the Cisco portfolio very rapidly, and in fact, more rapidly than the Meraki acquisition. We think that the merging of Observability into Cisco's core products could drive partnerships between Cisco's competitors in networking, security, and Observability.
Cisco Plus. Cisco Plus offering includes Hybrid Cloud and SASE offerings initially.
- SASE. Cisco's first Network as a Service (NaaS) focuses on its SASE offering. Nightingale emphasized that its SASE focus does not mean it is de-emphasizing SD-WAN, but includes SD-WAN, cloud security gateway, and other security functions. We see that the cloud security gateway (a cloud-based subscription offering) is a significant services capability for Cisco in that it is not a hardware function that Cisco is offering to customers to then resell to others, instead, it is a cloud-based service that Cisco is offering directly to customers. Cisco views SASE as the combination of networking, security and analytics. Executives from two different business units introduced SASE: Todd Nightingale (Core Networks) and Jeetu Patel (Security). Similar to our comments about Observability, we expect that Cisco's SASE offering will drive Cisco's competitors in networking and security into partnerships or other corporate combinations.
- Hybrid Cloud. The company will also offer private cloud capabilities such as its UCS server, SAN, DC networking (Nexus) and Intersight (orchestrator) as private cloud capabilities; the company has not yet announced names of 3rd partners. The company's entry to the private cloud as a service market has some similarities to HPE's Greenlake offering.
Intersight. The company emphasized its digital networking building capabilities by incorporating technology from Hashicorp with its in-house Intersight capability. We published our views on this Hashicorp / Cisco deal just a few days ago.

Security (includes Firewall, Content Security, Identity).

Password-less. The company announced its Duo portfolio now includes the unveiling of its Duo password-less authentication; the company says this capability will be available in July 2021 as a "public preview." The company indicated that it will also bring Duo and Umbrella capabilities "down market" and will also continue to be available to Cisco's traditional large enterprise. The company announced that it sees 900 million Duo-based authentications per month across its installed base.

Mass Scale portfolio (includes Data Center Switches, Optical Transport, Routing).

Silicon One. The company reiterated that it has 10 Silicon One chips since its initial announcements ranging from 3.2 Tbps to 25.6 Tbps speeds. The company claims that it has a dozen companies focusing on Routed Optical networks based on the architecture that leverages advancements relating to Silicon One and its just-closed Acacia optical technology. Executive Jonathan Davidson highlighted the Acacia ZR and ZR+ transponder module capabilities. Routed Optical networking offers capex, opex, and energy savings. The company suggests that existing customers who use Routers and optical transport today can take a first step that means plugging transponder modules directly into routers, meaning the need for optical shelves can be eliminated over time. Cisco featured spokespersons from Microsoft Azure and Lumen (Century Link) to discuss general thoughts on the Routed Optical concept.
Open RAN. The company has made investments, both disclosed and undisclosed. The company has engaged third parties' services to integrate and test its orchestration and transport technology with other 5G systems in the marketplace.
Subscriber Management. The company introduced Cisco Cloud Native Broadband Network Gateway, which supports the integration of wireless packet core and wireline subscriber management.