Splunk cost reduction

Stop paying Splunk to index noise your team will neverquery.

Splunk pricing is tied to daily ingest volume. Debug events in production, repeated health checks, and schema-invalid entries all consume your license. Cerbi filters them before the Universal Forwarder ever sees them.

The problem

Splunk license costs grow with application verbosity, not just application value

Every log event your application emits - whether it is a meaningful business event or a repeated health-check ping - counts against your Splunk daily ingest limit. Teams commonly find that 40 - 70% of their Splunk volume is debug output, infrastructure noise, or duplicate events that no analyst queries. Cribl can filter in the pipeline, but you are already transmitting those bytes from your application.

Before and after

Without Cerbi
01
level="verbose"Filtered
02
event="PingCheck"Filtered
03
apiKey="sk-prod-9x..."Secret
04
event="UserLoggedIn"
05
traceId="t_9d8c7b6a"
With Cerbi
01
level="[DROPPED]"Filtered
02
event="[DROPPED]"Filtered
03
apiKey="[REDACTED]"Secret removed
04
event="UserLoggedIn"
05
traceId="t_9d8c7b6a"

// Governance runs at emission time, inside the application process. The sink receives only governed output.

Architecture

Filter before the Universal Forwarder, not after

CerbiStream intercepts events inside your application process before they reach the Universal Forwarder or HTTP Event Collector. Dropped events never enter the Splunk pipeline and do not count toward your license.

Your application

emits log events

Logger framework

MEL / Serilog / NLog

CERBI

CerbiStream

filters at emission time

Splunk UF / HEC

receives filtered output

Splunk index

indexes governed events only

// Cerbi runs inside your process. No sidecar, no agent, no additional network hop.

Why existing tools are too late

Cribl and pipeline tools reduce forwarding, not emission

Events are already transmitted before Cribl sees them

Cribl processes events after they have left your application and entered the collection pipeline. Network bandwidth and upstream buffer costs are already incurred for every event Cribl later drops.

Heavy forwarder filtering adds operational overhead

Splunk Heavy Forwarder transforms and filters events in the pipeline layer. This requires infrastructure, configuration management, and a separate team to maintain - and it still does not prevent events from being emitted and transmitted from your application.

Application-level filtering requires developer involvement anyway

Debug log suppression in production is ultimately a developer and platform team decision. Cerbi enforces that decision at the logger level where developers already work.

How Cerbi fits with your stack

Cerbi works with all Splunk forwarder and ingestion methods

Compatible with Universal Forwarder

Files written by your application after Cerbi governance are forwarded by UF as normal. UF configuration does not change.

Compatible with HTTP Event Collector

Serilog Splunk sink and NLog Splunk target receive governed output from CerbiStream. HEC receives fewer, cleaner events.

Works alongside Cribl

Cerbi reduces what enters the Cribl pipeline. Cribl can then focus on routing and enrichment rather than volume reduction.

Level-based filtering by environment

Suppress verbose and debug events in production while allowing them in development and staging, without changing application code.

Common questions

Frequently asked

Stop Splunk ingest waste at the source

Install CerbiStream in under ten minutes. No infrastructure changes. No pipeline configuration. Governance runs inside your process from the first log event.

// local demo path: install from NuGet, PyPI, Maven, or the Go module registry - no account required

NEXTChoose your next proof

Use CerbiStream inside selected applications, Cerbi Gateway at the OpenTelemetry boundary, or both. CerbiShield keeps policy, rollout, violations, audit, and evidence under one governance program.

One initial workload/Customer-hosted in Azure/Existing destinations remain
Reduce Splunk Ingest Waste | Cerbi