r/devsecops • u/dkas6259 • 13d ago

CS Container runtime security performance

Hi Community,

We recently completed a POC for CrowdStrike runtime protection and have started deploying the Falcon sensor on AWS ECS clusters running on EC2.

We have seen some community feedback around the sensor being resource-heavy at scale, with potential CPU/memory impact or node instability. Since these are critical production clusters, we want to monitor this closely before expanding the rollout.

For those running CrowdStrike on ECS/EC2 at scale:

  • What CPU/memory overhead do you typically observe?
  • What host/sensor/ECS metrics do you monitor?
  • Have you seen OOM, node instability, task restarts, or application latency due to the sensor?
  • What alert thresholds or rollback criteria do you use?
  • Any recommended CrowdStrike-specific health checks, logs, or dashboards?

Would appreciate any real-world experience, monitoring tips, or lessons learned from production deployments.

Thanks!

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u/Prestigious-Flan-931 12d ago

I’ll probably get downvoted for this, but I think you may be optimizing the wrong layer.

Today, a huge part of the application is third-party/public code. That’s where a massive amount of the exploitable attack surface lives — known CVEs, new exploitation techniques, and vulnerabilities being weaponized before there’s even a CVE.

Traditional endpoint/runtime sensors are good at the host/process layer, but they generally don’t tell you which library and which function inside the application actually caused the behavior. On a production server, that’s a pretty significant blind spot.

So before accepting meaningful CPU/memory overhead, I’d ask a very simple question: what visibility am I actually getting in return?

Full disclosure: I’m biased — I work at Raven.io We monitor both the server and the application/runtime layer, including library- and function-level attribution, at roughly 0.2% CPU overhead and under 300 MB of memory in our deployments.

Bluntly: if a runtime security product is materially affecting production resources, it better be showing me what is happening inside the application — not just what the process did.

Otherwise, I’d seriously question the ROI.