Managing pipelines, routes, and knowledge objects across multiple Cribl worker groups, instances, or workspaces is now more efficient than ever with Cribl Packs. This powerful toolkit streamlines the organization and consistency of your Cribl routes, pipelines, and knowledge objects. By integrating with Git repositories, Cribl Packs further enhances collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work together seamlessly while centralizing configuration management. This modern approach simplifies your workflow and empowers your team to innovate and optimize data processing effortlessly.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of Cribl Packs, how linking them to external Git repositories helps multiple collaborators work on similar content, and finally, how Git can help distribute pack updates across worker groups and workspaces.
What Are Cribl Packs?
Cribl Packs are portable bundles of configuration items, such as pipelines, routes, and knowledge objects. Packs make it easy to:
Contain: Group together related configuration resources.
Share: Distribute these resources to different Cribl worker groups, instances, or workspaces.
Version: Keep track of changes via pack versions.
Why Use an External Git Repository?
Connecting Cribl Packs to an external Git repository unlocks a range of advantages:
Version Control: Git offers a robust mechanism for tracking changes, comparing revisions, and branching or tagging specific versions of your Cribl Packs.
Collaboration: Multiple team members can work on the same repository, enabling peer reviews and streamlined workflows.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): With Git at the core of many CI/CD pipelines, you can automate testing, deployments, and updates across all your worker groups and environments.
How Can I Git My First Pack?
Today, Cribl allows you to import a pack from an existing Git repository and provides the option to pull from a specific tag or branch of the main repo. For example:
Main (Production) Branch: A stable version of your pack thoroughly tested and approved for production.
Development Branches: A work-in-progress version where you can experiment with new routes or pipelines. By isolating your pack’s development branches, you reduce the risk of introducing breaking changes to your production-ready pack.
Import from Git
Workflow Example
Developer Testing: A developer modifies the Pack in a dev branch to test new transformations.
Export & Commit: Once satisfied with the changes, the developer exports the Pack from Cribl and manually commits it to the dev branch of the external Git repo.
Pull to Test Environment: Other test environments can pull from the dev branch, applying the updated transformations.
Merge to Main: After thorough testing, the dev branch is merged into the main branch, making the new configurations available for production.
Upgrade from another Git branch or tag
Modifying Packs in a Dev Branch
If you’re looking to adjust or troubleshoot a specific pipeline update like an eval or lookup table in a dev branch, you’ll typically need to:
Export the Pack from Cribl (where you’ve made local or UI-based changes).
Commit the Pack to the desired dev branch in your Git repository.
Pull the updated Pack across any relevant Cribl worker groups, instances, or workspaces once the changes are committed.
Ensure that your pack's exported contents are copied over exactly to prevent configuration drift between your Cribl development workspace and your Git repository.
Automated Workflows for Pack Distribution
One major benefit of integrating your Cribl Packs with Git is that you can leverage workflows to automatically push updates across multiple worker groups, instances, or workspaces.
Example Workflow
A new commit or tag is pushed to the Git repository containing the updated pack.
A CI/CD tool (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or any other runner) detects the commit. It triggers a job to import the updated pack version into designated Cribl worker groups, instances, or workspaces.
The workflow performs any necessary tests or health checks to validate that the new configurations are working as expected.
If all checks pass, the workflow automatically rolls the updated Pack out to production worker groups.
By orchestrating these steps, you reduce manual effort and ensure that packs are updated and distributed consistently.
Conclusion
In summary, connecting Cribl Packs to Git streamlines the management and distribution of your Cribl configuration objects. This integration enhances collaboration and version control of Cribl pipelines, routes, and knowledge objects within Packs. By leveraging automated workflows, you can further enhance your productivity and ensure that Pack updates are rolled out smoothly and consistently across your organization.
