Cribl Architecture & Components 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Cribl Stream destination type would you use to send processed events to Splunk's HTTP Event Collector?
- Splunk HEC (Correct answer)
- Splunk TCP (S2S)
- HTTP (Generic)
- Kafka Producer
Correct answer: Splunk HEC
The Splunk HEC destination sends events over HTTPS to Splunk's HTTP Event Collector endpoint, the preferred method for Splunk Cloud and on-premises HEC ingestion.
Question 2: What is Cribl Edge primarily designed to accomplish?
- Running Cribl Stream Leader functions at remote data centers
- Archiving cold data from Worker nodes to object storage
- Collecting and pre-processing observability data at or near the source before forwarding to a central pipeline (Correct answer)
- Providing a lightweight web UI for managing Cribl Stream configurations
Correct answer: Collecting and pre-processing observability data at or near the source before forwarding to a central pipeline
Cribl Edge is a lightweight agent deployed close to data sources — servers, containers, endpoints — to collect, filter, and reduce telemetry before it reaches the central pipeline.
Question 3: In Cribl Stream, which output format writes data to object storage (e.g., Amazon S3) in a columnar, compressed layout optimized for analytics?
- JSON Lines
- Raw text
- Splunk HEC JSON
- Parquet (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Parquet
Parquet is a columnar, compressed file format ideal for analytical platforms like Athena, Snowflake, and BigQuery when writing to object stores like S3.
Question 4: What does configuring 'Load Balancing' across multiple destination endpoints in Cribl Stream accomplish?
- It splits events evenly across multiple pipelines for parallel processing
- It distributes outgoing events across multiple destination endpoints to increase throughput and resilience (Correct answer)
- It balances CPU usage across all Worker nodes in a group
- It equally divides lookup table queries across multiple Leader nodes
Correct answer: It distributes outgoing events across multiple destination endpoints to increase throughput and resilience
When multiple endpoints are configured for a destination, Cribl round-robins or uses other strategies to distribute events, improving throughput and fault tolerance.
Question 5: Which protocol does the Cribl Stream 'Syslog' source use to receive events from network devices and servers?
- UDP and/or TCP on configurable ports, commonly port 514 (Correct answer)
- HTTPS on port 443 exclusively
- AMQP on port 5672
- gRPC on port 4317
Correct answer: UDP and/or TCP on configurable ports, commonly port 514
Syslog sources in Cribl accept both UDP and TCP connections, typically on port 514, which is the standard syslog port used by network devices and Linux servers.
Question 6: What role does Cribl Lake play in the Cribl product suite?
- It is the internal name for Cribl's pipeline processing engine
- It provides long-term cold storage for Cribl configuration backups only
- It acts as the primary search index layer powering Cribl Search queries
- It is an object-storage-based data lake for storing and replaying raw or processed observability data (Correct answer)
Correct answer: It is an object-storage-based data lake for storing and replaying raw or processed observability data
Cribl Lake provides a managed data lake layer built on object storage, enabling storage of telemetry data that can be searched, replayed, or forwarded at any time.
Question 7: What is the purpose of configuring 'Backpressure' behavior on a Cribl Stream destination?
- To increase the processing priority of high-volume events in the pipeline queue
- To automatically scale up Worker nodes when event rates exceed defined thresholds
- To control how Worker nodes respond when a destination is slow or unavailable, protecting upstream data integrity (Correct answer)
- To trigger alerts when destination throughput drops below a configured threshold
Correct answer: To control how Worker nodes respond when a destination is slow or unavailable, protecting upstream data integrity
Backpressure settings determine whether Cribl buffers, drops, or blocks events when a destination cannot keep up, preventing data loss and cascade failures upstream.
Cribl Architecture & Components 4
Which Cribl Stream destination type would you use to send processed events to Splunk's HTTP Event Collector?