.avif)
Telemetry pipelines are one of the most exciting things to happen to streaming data in a decade, and the products are gaining a ton of momentum. In the evolving landscape of observability and security, teams are faced with an overwhelming volume of telemetry data: logs, metrics, and traces, coming from increasingly complex environments.
When the CAGR of data growth in production environments can range anywhere from 20% to 50% (annual growth), managing this data efficiently and cost effectively is a challenge that organizations are solving with this new foundation.
If you're a large enterprise and you have a lot of data, being able to work with that data in stream, pre-index, is a critical capability. By next year, analysts are expecting a huge portion of logs will be processed through these pipelines:
Three Most Prevalent Products in the Market
- Cribl – Cribl Stream is the main product, which is a data routing and transformation solution that provides flexibility in how logs are processed and sent to different observability and security tools.
- Edge Delta – the flagship offering is a telemetry pipeline that processes logs, metrics, and traces. Innovative, trusted, battle tested for teams that need to manage exponential volumes of observability and security data.
- DIY OpenTelemetry (OTel) – A fully open-source approach that allows organizations to instrument, collect, and route observability data without relying on a vendor. A good option for teams that have a lot of additional engineering resources.
While all three approaches aim to optimize observability and security data, they differ in scalability, efficiency, management overhead, intelligence, and cost.
Let’s dive in.
Why Are We Shifting Left Towards The Data Sources?
For years, traditional logging architectures followed a "realization lag" which meant only unlocking data value after ingestion, indexing, and querying. As shown in the diagram below as an example, raw logs go through a slow, expensive journey:
Collection → Compression → Encryption → Shipping → Unpacking → Ingestion → Indexing → Querying → Dashboards → Alerts
The problem? The further downstream you make decisions, the higher the cost, the bigger the scalability issues, and you're also maximizing latency. Modern enterprises are shifting left. Instead of waiting until indexing to extract insights, teams are filtering, masking, enriching, and processing data further left, closer to the source.
Telemetry pipelines give you the comprehensive toolbox for control and flexibility to implement optimizations and data tiering to move past the legacy architectures. This is why the industry is shifting left. Let's get into the top considerations.
Scalability, Performance, and Efficiency
Cribl: Flexible, but Limited by Scalability
Cribl takes a more traditional central stream-processing approach for their main product, allowing organizations to manipulate and control telemetry pipelines much closer to their existing ecosystem (e.g., Splunk, Kafka, or SIEMs). However, since Cribl Stream primarily acts centrally as a data broker rather than a product built for new architectures, customers are still limited by the scalability constraints. The Cribl Edge offering did recently remove some hard limits, but some engineering teams still feel they're being pushed towards the much higher cost stream offering.
Edge Delta: Built for Scale and High Performance
Edge Delta’s architecture is designed to process telemetry data at the source, rather than waiting until data is ingested into a backend. This approach reduces infrastructure strain and allows real-time analytics on massive data volumes. Unlike Cribl, which primarily routes and transforms data, Edge Delta performs intelligent filtering, anomaly detection, and enrichment at the edge, enabling security and SRE teams to act faster.
Additionally, Edge Delta supports horizontal and vertical scalability, making it ideal for large enterprises dealing with petabyte-scale telemetry.
DIY OpenTelemetry: The Open-Source Route, Great For DIYers
OpenTelemetry is the industry standard for instrumenting applications and collecting telemetry data without vendor lock-in. While this makes it attractive, scaling OpenTelemetry requires significant engineering effort. Unlike Edge Delta and Cribl, which offer pre-built scaling mechanisms, DIY OpenTelemetry requires:
- Custom OTel or other OSS collectors and processors
- Load balancing strategies
- Storage optimization for high-throughput telemetry
While OpenTelemetry is free to use, the hidden cost lies in engineering effort, maintenance, and infrastructure to ensure real-time scalability.
Data Management Experience and Team Collaboration
Cribl: Requires Manual Configuration and Customization
Cribl is highly configurable but requires a lot of manual effort to define routing rules, filters, and transformations. While this level of control is useful for some teams, it increases operational complexity and makes cross-team collaboration difficult since observability and security teams often need different views of the same data. Though flexible, the individual pipelines without a cohesive view can lead to an understanding that is fragmented across large teams.
Edge Delta: Automated and Effortless with Flexibility If Needed
Edge Delta prioritizes out of the box support for many sources and destinations with simple automation over the requirement for manual configuration, enabling organizations to process logs, metrics, traces, and events effortlessly. Unlike Cribl, which requires significant manual configuration, Edge Delta provides built-in intelligence and monitoring to automatically detect patterns, anomalies, and trends - minimizing the need for constant pipeline tuning.
DIY OpenTelemetry: Completely Manual, High Engineering Overhead
DIY OpenTelemetry requires full ownership of data pipelines, including:
- Manually configuring collectors, exporters, and processors
- Ensuring schema consistency across observability and security teams
- Building integrations with SIEMs, APMs, and data lakes
While OpenTelemetry is powerful, it lacks the out-of-the-box cross-team collaboration that Edge Delta offers. Organizations must invest in custom dashboards, data normalization, and governance structures to make telemetry data usable across teams.
Intelligence, Anomaly Detection, and Pipeline Insights
Cribl: Good for Data Routing, Limited for Intelligence
Cribl allows organizations to route and transform data but does not inherently provide anomaly detection or predictive insights. To gain intelligence from Cribl-managed data, teams must rely on downstream SIEMs and APMs—which can be costly and inefficient.
Caption: Real-time AI surfaces anomalous behavior and offers summaries and suggestions to speed remediation.
Edge Delta: Native Intelligence Out of the Box
Edge Delta has advanced monitoring capabilities and automatically detects patterns and baselines telemetry data, providing real-time anomaly detection, incident summaries, and recommendations at petabyte scale. Unlike Cribl and OpenTelemetry, which primarily focus on data routing, Edge Delta adds intelligence within the data pipeline with correlation capabilities on the backend as well. Edge Delta's Real-Time AI capabilities are also a unique differentiator in the market, enabling faster root-cause analysis and proactive suggestion remediations.
DIY OpenTelemetry: Intelligence Requires Additional Tooling
OpenTelemetry provides raw telemetry data, but it does not include built-in intelligence. To be fair this is not the purpose of OTel, and organizations can simply deploy separate observability, anomaly detection and ML models to extract insights from their data. This adds significant engineering and infrastructure complexity, but also provides high levels of autonomy and flexibility for organizations that have the engineering power.
Pricing: Cost Transparency vs. Hidden Costs
Cribl
$0.21 per GB, with additional data ingestion costs if you need to opt for the Cribl Stream product ($0.31 per GB as well as additional infrastructure costs).
Edge Delta
$0.10 per GB flat transparent pricing, with volume based discounts.
DIY OpenTelemetry
Open-source and “free,” but hidden costs arise from engineering time, compute resources, storage, and operational maintenance.
Key takeaway
Cribl can be considered overpriced and while OpenTelemetry is technically free, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is often higher than a managed platform like Edge Delta due to infrastructure and operational overhead.
Conclusion: Which Approach is Right for You?
For organizations seeking a scalable, automated, and cost-efficient observability solution, Edge Delta provides the best combination of performance, intelligence, and ease of use. Cribl offers flexibility and has more integrations, but requires a lot of manual configurations. Open Telemetry is a good option that is vendor-agnostic, but can demand significant engineering and operational investment to match the capabilities of managed solutions.
As observability and security become increasingly intertwined, choosing the right data management strategy can be the difference between efficiency and operational bottlenecks.
Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Edge Delta. If you're wondering about validating some of the ideas in this article, I'll leave you with this quote from another analyst:
