How To Limit Endpoint Resource Utilization

How To Limit Endpoint Resource Utilization

Introduction

The Uptycs osquery agent is designed for low resource utilization on your endpoints, however there may still be some cases where you need to limit resource utilization, this article describes how. 


Watchdog 

'Configuration -> Flag profiles' allows you to adjust settings for the osquery agent watchdog. These settings include general high/low/off watchdog limits or allow specific memory and CPU utilization limits. 


Data Collection Query Intervals

One way that osquery collects data is via scheduled queries. Under 'Configuration -> Custom profiles' you can adjust the interval (increase interval to reduce utilization) that these queries run or disable certain queries all together. 

 

Event Data

Another way that osquery collects data is via the pub-sub eventing framework. Event data can be high volume and you may wish to turn off certain types of event data on certain servers, you can specify which types of event data are captured under 'Configuration -> Flag profiles'

Note the performance impact of the pub-sub event framework can be significant for high volume events. The reason for the performance impact is frequent writing to and reading from the RocksDB backing store, Uptycs has added a feature that allows you to bypass this RocksDB staging and send the event data straight to the SaaS backend. This feature is called 'disable_events_staging' and can be set inside your Flag profile. 


Event Exclusion Profiles

Most customers want to capture event data and find that using the 'disable_event_staging' will reduce the performance impact on their endpoints to an acceptable level. However in certain situations (large servers) event volumes can be so high that an alternative solution is required. Event exclusion profiles allow customers to exclude certain event data at the agent (saving network resources too). 'Configuration -> Event exclude profiles' allows you to build a custom set of exclusion rules to exclude uninteresting, high volume events, such as socket_events between servers on your internal (10.) network. 

   


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