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Cribl vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
38th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl1.2%
ServiceNow Cloud Observability0.7%
Other98.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Aman Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has helped reduce daily log volume significantly and streamline data routing across multiple destinations
Regarding complexity, as I mentioned before, Cribl is very simple to use. When I started 2.5 years ago, it was very easy to learn. I learned Cribl within a week, and even though I was a fresher at the time, it was easy to understand and not complex enough that someone would need to spend money on labs. It's not that complex to learn. Regarding cost efficiency, it's very good because nowadays the SIEM tools we use are too expensive on license, and SIEM tools base their license on how many logs get ingested. The unwanted logs, particularly firewall logs, represent a significant portion of unnecessary ingestion. Cribl saves our license by filtering out half of the firewall logs that are unwanted. Our main purpose for using Cribl is to save our license and save money. Currently, everyone is moving toward AI agents. We currently use regex, and AI agents could help us create those regex patterns to drop events or add raw data to events. Currently, we sit down, review the logs, and create regex patterns manually, which can be time-consuming. An AI agent could reduce this time. I read some articles indicating that Cribl Cloud has started using AI and considering MCPs and model context, but I'm not certain how far along they are. If Cribl asked me what they could improve, that would be my suggestion. The support is very good, and I had a few issues with Cribl where I raised support cases and received good responses, which is better than the quick response I didn't get from other SIEM tools and vendor tools I use. Compared to other SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper than Splunk and DataDogs. However, it's still a bit expensive from my point of view, though I won't call it expensive. Overall, I think 99% of companies use Cribl before their SIEM tools, and compared to SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper. Companies can use any SIEM tool such as Google, Splunk, or Cisco, and Cribl is cheaper than those SIEM tools. They might have a slight chance to reduce costs further, but I'm not the correct person to evaluate that since I'm more focused on the operational side. Regarding training, it was quite easy to grasp. It took me almost a week to understand the basic functionalities and what Cribl does. Getting more expertise took additional time, but basic functionalities and understanding what Cribl does took around four to five days. One point I want to mention is that Cribl could improve their labs or training materials in their Cribl Cloud or whatever portal they have.
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DeliveryManager at ITC Infotech
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I appreciate the most about Cribl is the free training, the free access to all the training, and how easy it is to learn it."
"The best feature in Cribl, when getting logs from some custom application, is the ability to break up logs that pile up together and come as one event."
"We reduce cost by using Cribl to control what data we need to be sent over to the SIEM, and we were able to use their functionality, specifically aggregation and also some of the drop functions within Cribl to cut down this noise, send a full copy of the data to S3 or a different data lake, and then send the reduced log over to the SIEM."
"The feature I appreciate most about Cribl is that it is really easy to use and quick to replicate data models on different data sets."
"Cribl offers other valuable features. For instance, you can replay data from an edge device, store your daily data in a stream, and replay specific event data into Splunk if a security incident occurs"
"Mostly because of the positive reasons, I would say it is easy to use, it is sustainable, the support is nice, the coding is quite easy to understand, there are a lot of functionalities there, you can do a lot of things, and the data migration is very easy."
"The capability to reduce logs in a user-friendly manner is a standout feature. Cribl allows us to view logs live as they are being processed, giving us quick feedback on the changes made."
"The product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
 

Cons

"Regarding Cribl's ability to contain data cost and complexity, if they can reduce their cost, that will make them more competitive."
"Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful."
"Cribl can improve by providing automated analytics and advanced parsing capabilities since it handles data at its core."
"Cribl doesn't have as many packs available"
"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"I do not think that if the pricing is on the higher side, it could be suitable for all types of users, such as small or medium ones."
"Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility."
"It would be really nice to be able to see Cribl gain insights from the data as the data is in stream, in flight, on the way to wherever its final storage destination is."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise20
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I am not aware of the pricing because I was not a part of it. We were developers. But as far as I understood, I think it is a bit expensive. I am no one to complain, but there was this person on Li...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
In Cribl, I feel that maybe I am not aware of it, or maybe it is already there, but I think if there was a way to learn more about it. There are a lot of areas to explore. For example, if my work i...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
I was not regularly using the same tool, but there was a time when our team needed to migrate some data from one tool to another, and during that data migration phase, we used Cribl for six to seve...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
What advice do you have for others considering LightStep?
I recommend the product to others. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.