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Cribl vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 26, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.5
Cribl customer service is praised for prompt responses, effective support, and community assistance, with a high satisfaction rating.
Sentiment score
7.9
Grafana Loki's support combines community aid and resources with varying user satisfaction, requiring effort for integration and documentation navigation.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
We have not had to open any tickets yet, as we solve issues through forums and wikis.
 

Room For Improvement

Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl needs better legacy compatibility, intuitive logging, enhanced documentation, improved onboarding, and desktop server functionality for developers.
Sentiment score
8.0
Grafana Loki needs better flow visibility, request correlation, stability, Docker integration, and enhanced scalability, security, and reporting features.
Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Cribl is scalable and easily integrates with CI/CD pipelines, receiving praise for efficient deployment and seamless cloud management.
Sentiment score
8.5
Grafana Loki is praised for its scalability, reliable operations, and ability to handle large systems and data efficiently.
Loki offers great scalability, allowing us to manage and compress logs extensively.
 

Setup Cost

Sentiment score
8.0
Cribl offers a cost-effective, scalable pricing model with up to 30% cost reductions, appealing to mid-level and large enterprises.
No sentiment score available
Grafana Loki provides cost-effective pricing options with a popular free open-source version and a competitively priced cloud version.
The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Cribl is generally rated 7-8 for stability, with minor bugs quickly addressed and continuous development enhancing reliability.
Sentiment score
8.1
Grafana Loki is generally stable, but some users encounter issues with log retrieval and outdated methods affecting stability.
 

Valuable Features

Sentiment score
8.7
Cribl streamlines real-time data transformation, log collection, and routing with user-friendly features, security, and extensive integration support.
No sentiment score available
Grafana Loki offers easy deployment, cost-effectiveness, and robust log monitoring with seamless Grafana integration and Kubernetes compatibility.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
18th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (23rd), Data Integration (23rd), Cloud Data Integration (15th), Data Preparation Tools (4th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 0.8%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 6.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hariram G - PeerSpot reviewer
Collects logs from various cloud sources with reduced costs and improved efficiency
Cribl has simplified many aspects of the onboarding process, but there's still room for improvement. Currently, no other tools in the market truly compete with Cribl in its niche. Splunk is trying to retain customers by developing ingest actions to reduce licensing costs, hoping to prevent them from switching to Cribl. There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status. Since Cribl plays a major role in the mid-layer between the source and destination, there's a slight risk of losing data at some points while receiving real time data. It would be helpful if Cribl could temporarily store or index the data for a specific time range. This would prevent data loss during downtime. Additionally, there's room for improvement in how Cribl handles historical data. Currently, I can't view trends beyond a week, and even then, it’s often limited to just 24 hours. Since Cribl doesn’t index the data but only forwards it, extending the period for viewing statistics and monitoring trends would be a valuable enhancement.
Arjun Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective for Logging, recovery from node failures is fast and single UI supports metrics, logs, and even tracing
If it is HelloGuard setup or doing some setup on the dev cluster, it's pretty straightforward. But when we're dealing with a heavy cluster, like 15 to 20 terabytes of data per day, we need a production-grade cluster. For that kind of scenario, we must invest time and understand the process. We could have integrated these features within their health check, but they're using processes like Tanka and Jsonnet to implement a production service. I feel this could have been better. If I use a metric solution for metrics, I'd use Grafana for metrics monitoring. For logging, I'd use a different tool, like ELK. And for tracing another tool. So, to troubleshoot a specific issue, I have to switch between three different consoles. What I see in metrics isn't the same as in logs because the metadata and collection methods differ. That's where Loki comes in. Within Grafana, you can see metrics, logs, correlations, generate metrics from logs, and also set alerts. Alerting from logs is something many companies desire. With Loki, if there's a pattern in the log, we can filter it out without altering the entire pipeline. For instance, if I had to add fields in ELK, it would require a lot of configuration changes. Loki, however, is more flexible. It uses a grep-like pattern and the metadata model from Prometheus. It's highly efficient, with compressed data and block storage like GCS bucket or AWS S3, making log storage cost-effective. Compared to other solutions, it's more economical. Loki also has a Log CLI, which is very effective. It's all on-premises. Like, it's on the cloud, but it's self-managed, not a managed service.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Cribl offers a reduction in pricing, up to thirty percent, which is beneficial. Although I'm not involved in licensing, I know that the price reduction is accurate and well-received.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl. Additionally, there's room for more enhancement conce...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
In this particular situation, we use Cribl to deploy data to various destinations. My role is to create and analyze data and deploy it to the appropriate location required by the organization. I al...
What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment. The solution is very stable, and further improvements might result in it becoming resource-intensive like other solutions.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.