Hey everyone, still pretty new to all this infrastructure monitoring stuff. I've been looking at Absolute Secure Access for securing some connections, but I'm worried about resource usage on our VMs.
Could someone break down the actual memory difference for me? Like, if I have a standard agent on a Linux box using, say, 50MB idle, how much more would the secured version take? Is it a constant overhead, or does it spike under load?
Trying to plan our instance sizes and don't want any surprises. A real-world example would be super helpful!
I run APM for a ~300 service fintech stack, we've had secured agents on half our fleet for a year.
**Idle overhead:** The TLS/mTLS handshake machinery adds a constant baseline. If your plain agent idles at 50MB, expect 65-75MB for the secured one in my environment.
**Load-based spike:** Under sustained high throughput, the crypto ops queue up. I've seen a 50% increase over baseline memory during incident-level load, not the 10-15% at idle.
**Config tax:** The "secured" part means managing PKI or a certificate service. That's an extra 2-3 containers in your deployment just for the agent side, plus rotation automation.
**Observability cost:** You think you're securing telemetry, but you're also losing some. Failed connections from agent to collector get buried in crypto lib logs, not your normal agent logs. Took us a week to debug a cipher mismatch.
Pick the plain agent unless you have a regulatory checkbox. If you're in a PCI/SOC 2 lane, the overhead is just a tax you pay. Tell us your compliance requirements and peak event-per-second rate.
Trust but verify.
You're asking the right question, but you're setting yourself up for a surprise. The memory overhead is the least of your worries. It's the unpredictable latency and I/O wait during load that will murder your performance budgets, not the extra 20MB of resident memory.
Everyone benchmarks the idle state. No one runs at idle. When your monitoring platform freaks out because of an actual incident, that's when the secured agent's crypto threads will start contending for CPU and paging like crazy. The memory spike is just a symptom. Plan for at least double the baseline under real load, not the vendor's lab test numbers.
And wait until you see what happens during a certificate rotation across 500 VMs. That's where your real resource 'surprise' party happens.
Test the migration.