Journal ·Playbook
Route Before You Index: How Cribl Reduces Splunk Costs 40 to 70 Percent
Firewall allow logs represent 60 to 70 percent of most Splunk ingest volumes. Nobody searches them. Here is the pipeline architecture that sends high-value events to Splunk and everything else to S3 at a fraction of the cost.
Zbigniew Gajuk · 2026-03-28 · 1 min read
For: CFO and FinOps · CISO and SOC
The Splunk cost model
Splunk charges by daily GB ingested. Renewal uplift compounds at approximately 9 percent annually. There is no native deduplication, meaning 30-50 percent of ingested events are redundant. Dedicated Splunk administrators cost $120K to $170K per year, and most of their time goes to parsing configuration rather than security analysis.
Where the waste lives
Firewall allow logs represent 60-70 percent of total ingest volume in most Splunk environments. Nobody searches them. Bulk DNS queries, successful authentication events, and debug logs contribute additional volume with zero detection value. You are paying full analytics-tier pricing for data that has no analytical purpose.
The routing architecture
A Cribl pipeline routes data to multiple destinations simultaneously. High-value security events (deny actions, threat indicators, anomalies) go to Splunk. Everything else goes to S3 at roughly $0.023 per GB per month versus $150+ per GB per year in Splunk.
Cribl Suppress deduplicates events using configurable key fields and time windows. Cribl Pipelines replace props.conf and transforms.conf for normalization. Cribl Edge replaces Heavy Forwarders entirely. The heaviest Splunk administration work moves to the pipeline.
What stays in Splunk
Every event that triggers alerts, populates dashboards, or supports investigation workflows stays in Splunk unchanged. Your existing SPL, saved searches, and dashboards continue to function. The data they reference is the same. What changes is that the 60-70 percent of volume nobody uses no longer costs analytics-tier pricing.