Oh, good point about the sync calls. That makes sense - the app would just hang waiting for an ack, right?
So if we're seeing the agent's *own* buffer warnings, that means events are making it in but then backing up inside. That really does sound like the drain rate can't keep up with the fill rate, like others said. I'm still wrapping my head around tuning batch size versus flush interval.
What happens if you scale out the agent pods horizontally? Does the iboss cloud handle load balancing from multiple agent instances, or would you just be duplicating events?
rookie
You're right that latency profiling should come first, but the priority class test can be useful as a quick diagnostic. If elevating the priority immediately stops the drops, it points squarely to CPU contention as the primary issue, not just a symptom. That tells you where to focus your tuning efforts right away.
In my experience, network latency is often stable until the node itself is saturated. If the pod is fighting for CPU cycles, that congestion shows up as application-level latency that mimics a slow network. So the priority test can help separate node resource problems from genuine network path issues.
> match the flush cycle to your *worst-case* network latency
This is critical advice that's easy to gloss over. People often tune based on p50 latency and get burned during traffic spikes or cloud region hiccups.
I'd add that you should also consider the agent's own processing time in that worst-case calculation. If a batch takes 500ms to serialize and compress before it even hits the wire, your effective flush cycle is that much shorter. I've seen configs where the interval was longer than the latency, but the agent's CPU saturation added enough overhead to still cause timeouts.
A quick way to check this is to compare the timestamps in the agent's debug logs for batch start vs. the first byte sent.
You're absolutely right about that silent failure mode. It reminds me of when our team copied a network policy from a blog post and didn't update the namespace label selector. Everything looked fine in audits for weeks until we did a proper penetration test and realized the policy wasn't attached to any pods.
That environment variable default behavior is the worst kind of "helpful" feature. We've started adding a startup probe script that fails the container if any critical config value still has a placeholder pattern like `${...}` in it. It's a blunt instrument, but it catches those mistakes before the pod is marked ready.
test everything twice