How Cribl gave employees the power to automate their own work
Cribl's IT team didn't go looking for Serval. Once they found it, they couldn't stop using it — or sharing it.
PJ Barry
Director, IT Support and Engineering
Leo Guzman
Senior Manager, IT Engineering
Alex Pannier
Senior IT Systems Engineer
Ana Monroy Zolano
Information Technology Engineer
PJ Barry,
Company name
Cribl
Industry
Cloud and Data Management
Cribl is the AI platform for telemetry. It helps organizations, including half of the Fortune 100, bridge the gap between AI ambition and infrastructure reality through pipelining and data qualification for telemetry coming from IT and security systems. With a vendor-agnostic approach, Cribl is one of the fastest-growing companies in the observability space.
Behind the scenes, a three-person IT engineering team is responsible for maintaining the systems, automations, and integrations that keep the business humming.
Good enough, until it wasn't
Cribl's IT team wasn't in crisis. That was almost the problem. Their small IT engineering team of three were experienced builders. Before Serval, they owned the complex workflows that kept the business running: onboarding, offboarding, and more. But every new automation took days of engineering effort across multiple complex systems. Once something was built, it had to be maintained.
The team was spending more time keeping up than moving forward.
Automated workflows were already in place, but they were time-consuming to build, hard to maintain, and impossible to hand off to anyone without technical expertise.
New ideas were always there. The bandwidth wasn't.
They needed a fast and reliable way to build automations so they could focus on higher leverage projects.
A new way to build
Three weeks of consultant work. Twenty minutes in Serval.
The Serval relationship started with a referral from mutual contacts. PJ Barry, Director of IT Support and Engineering, took the call as a courtesy. His team had just finished a major implementation with a new ITSM platform. It was a months-long, expensive undertaking that had required outside consultants to build integrations. Switching to a new platform was off the table.
The demo changed that.
To show what Serval could do, the team asked a simple question: what's a problem that's been frustrating you lately? The answer was a connection between two of Cribl’s core tools, their support ticketing system and their company chat app, that should have been simple to set up but had taken outside consultants nearly three weeks to get right.
Serval built it in twenty minutes.
By the end of the meeting, the whole team was convinced. The director went back to leadership, in the middle of a budget cycle, with no money set aside, and made the case: most tools automate routine tasks. This one could do the thinking. Leadership said yes.
"The value in good automation tools is evidenced by how much companies were willing to spend in the old way of doing things. With Serval, you can simply talk to the system, explain what you need, and get great results very, very quickly. Except you don't have to incur those massive costs. That's a real no brainer."
PJ Barry
Director of IT Support and Engineering, Cribl
Serval was connected to Cribl's core systems in minutes. Within hours, the team was getting value out of it.
The early wins came fast. They started with the tasks that had always eaten the most time: getting new employees set up, removing access for people who'd left, keeping hardware inventories up to date. These were processes the team had been managing for years, but building and maintaining them had always required significant engineering effort. With Serval, the same work now took hours instead of days, not because anyone worked faster, but because the team no longer had to write code at all. They described what they needed in plain language, and Serval built it.
"We went from idea to working automation in under an hour. Someone says 'wouldn't it be nice if...' — and an hour later, that's a thing that actually happens."
PJ Barry
Director of IT Support and Engineering, Cribl
Looking ahead
With the hardest work handled, Cribl began extending Serval beyond the IT engineering team.
First to the people who handle day-to-day employee support. Then to the interns, who created several automations while experimenting with the tool that moved into long-term production. Then to finance and legal.
Vendor contracts are monitored automatically, with alerts sent to the right people at 90, 60, 45, and 30 days out. Renewals kick off from a single chat message..
Routine data updates that previously had to be done record by record, are now handled automatically. Offboarding is enforced consistently, with no missed steps.
Approvals that used to take hours now arrive in under a minute.
While automation requests used to pile up faster than the team could build them, Serval has given IT engineers the time to focus on higher value work across the company.
"Companies build automations and never account for the cost to maintain them. With Serval, we can help someone build something, give them ownership, and it doesn't take up IT resources anymore."
PJ Barry
Director of IT Support and Engineering, Cribl
Takeaway
Serval moved Cribl’s team from asking"can we automate this?" to "why haven't we automated this yet?"
That's the kind of change that compounds.
"We find a new use for Serval every day. We find a capability we didn't know it had."
PJ Barry
Director of IT Support and Engineering, Cribl
Even though the number of requests has gone up 30–40%, the burden of responding to tickets has actually gone down. That’s not a sentence you hear often.