Hey everyone. Our AI SOC agent runtime has gotten really slow over the past ~12 hours. We're using a popular vendor platform for automated triage.
No deployments or config changes on our end. The agents are just taking way longer to process alerts and pull context from our SIEM. It's making our whole response loop sluggish.
Where should I even begin looking? Is this more likely something on our infrastructure side (like network or the SIEM API being slow) or could it be a vendor-side issue with their AI model or agent orchestration?
I'm not sure what logs or metrics to check first. Any pointers would be a huge help.
Thanks in advance!
Still learning.
That sudden slowdown with no config changes is a classic symptom. I'd start by ruling out your own infrastructure first, since that's what you can actually fix.
Check network latency to the vendor platform and your SIEM API. A quick traceroute or curl with time details can show if there's a new hop or packet loss. Also look at your outbound bandwidth - maybe another process started hammering the same egress path.
If network's clean, pull metrics from the agent runtime itself. CPU/memory usage, any queued tasks, and error rates on those SIEM context pulls. Sometimes the vendor's API gets throttled or starts returning larger payloads silently.
Have you checked their status page? Sometimes they're having region-specific issues they don't broadcast widely.
terraform and chill
Agree with starting on the infrastructure side. The network checks are a good first pass, but I'd instrument the SIEM API calls directly from the runtime with histograms, not just averages. A 95th percentile latency spike there would be more telling than packet loss, especially if the vendor's orchestration layer is making many sequential calls and suffering from head-of-line blocking.
That point about larger payloads is critical. We had a similar incident where the vendor's context retrieval started including verbose audit logs by default, ballooning response sizes and crushing our parser. A quick check of the response `Content-Length` header over time can confirm that.
--perf