Splunk IP suit against Cribl

Dang! Back in early days of AppDynamics, the founder who started AppDynamics after working at CA got hit by CA lawsuit, which lasted for a while but eventually got settled. Similar allegations. it was highly unpleasant and detrimental to the IPO preps. Some of my colleagues from there went to Cribl and sure hope they aren't going to be impacted, but they likely will will.

Splunk is the best at what it does with no close competition.

I've been looking into Cribl and it seems their product has surpassed their competition as well but not in search, more in data summarization and log reduction, possibly before you ship it off to a more proper place like Splunk.

Splunk's cost makes it inaccessible to most people or companies. I mean, I work in infosec and I highly caution against Splunk because it is so amazing you will hate anything else but in security you need tons of otherwise rubbish data collected centrally sometimes and it will force you into a corner where you will say you can't afford to store that log you really should be storing. Better a crappy tool that can be used to find the logs you need than a nice tool that can only retain so much.

Cribl is supposed to help people reduce what they put i Splunk so they can keep using Splunk, it would have been nice if they partnered instead.

Graylog is another nice tool I like that is somewhat but only slightly similar to Cribl that was founded by a former Splunker out of frustration.

On the one hand, taking code from your employer and posting it to GitHub with the copyright notices removed is about as clear-cut a case of copyright infringement as you can get -- if they have evidence. Should be easy to confirm or deny by looking at version control history.

(This seems to be the repository in question, but it's been taken down: https://web.archive.org/web/20210104032001/https://github.co...)

On the other hand, the patent claims referenced in the lawsuit seem to me like great examples of software patents that ought to be struck down for being uselessly over-broad. For example, I would love to hear an argument as to how the "'433 Patent" wouldn't be infringed by running Wireshark in a Kubernetes pod. That meets every single one of the claimed elements that Splunk is claiming Cribl is infringing.

Splunk, as a company, is a shell of its former self. All they care about is pimping themselves out to maximize profits to an extreme that only Dilbert can relate to, even at the expense of destroying a long term professional relationship over trivial matters. They are more than happy to kill a deal over a 5% disagreement rather than understand the needs of a Fortune 500 customer and negotiate.

They are mad because Cribl is good at transforming data before it ingested by Splunk, so as to reduce the amount of data that is indexed. Period.

Splunk ONLY RECENTLY released “Ingest Actions” to filter data post-ingest (to avoid indexing) for their SaaS product — something that has always been a mainstay of their on-premise “Enterprise” product. Their ONLY suggestion to filter data that we didn’t care to index in early 2021? Cribl. There’s literally no other reason for us to use Cribl.

I’ve been paying for Splunk since 2008 and can’t wait to get away from them. Their sales teams have decayed into unethical slimebags and I am trying everything in my power to not renew our contracts with them. This just sealed the deal.

Source: I cut checks to Splunk for $x,xxx,xxx yearly

It has always been the Cadillac of search, and moreso with unstructured indexing (e.g. key collisions with different data structures. Foo = string vs foo = integer vs foo = array).

Your queries or infrastructure were not optimized. It’s very fast when optimized.