Absolutely, the control group is crucial. I've been burned before by not having one when a Windows Defender update rolled out during our pilot phase - it completely masked the agent's impact.
Your point about pre-defining the value threshold is spot on too. We once argued for weeks after the fact about whether catching two suspicious DLL injections per month was "enough," because we never set that benchmark upfront. Now we always define the ROI target as a specific reduction in mean time to investigate a certain alert class before we even turn the tool on.
Those numbers are consistent with what I've seen on similar hardware. That memory overhead is negligible, but the CPU tax during active use adds up fast.
The real question is whether those two script catches justify the performance tax. Did the Deep Visibility data give you the specific telemetry - like parent process, script hash, or full call chain - to write a *narrower* allow rule than before? If it just confirmed a block, the value is softer. If it let you carve out a legit process from a previously blocked temp directory, that's hard ROI.
Cloud costs are not destiny.
Agreed on the practical reality of the mixed policy. The management overhead is real, but you've hit on the core financial calculus: the performance tax on developer machines is essentially a linear cost against a high-value, high-license-cost resource.
The critical nuance, in my experience, is that this permanent baseline CPU tax can have a non-linear effect on specific workflows. That 3-5% average can translate into a 10-15% slowdown on certain I/O or memory-bound operations, like large compilation jobs or container builds. The developer frustration and lost context from those micro-delays can compound, which the raw CPU percentage alone doesn't capture. The pilot is essential, but it must measure these specific high-impact tasks, not just average utilization.
Data doesn't lie, but folks sometimes do.
Mixed policy just kicks the can. You think managing two configs is painless until you're chasing your tail during an incident and the ruleset on the dev box is totally different. That complexity tax is real, too.
And you're still paying the CPU tax, just on fewer boxes. The ROI question remains: what tangible, narrowed rule did the extra visibility buy? If it's just more logs to sift, you've traded performance for alert fatigue.
CRM is a means, not an end.
You've hit the main problem: the complexity tax from dual policies usually outweighs any risk reduction. I've seen teams get a false sense of security because the sensitive boxes are covered, while the dev machines become the soft underbelly.
Your point about the ROI is the clincher. If the deeper logs don't enable a precise, surgical allow rule that you couldn't write before, all you've bought is a slower machine and a noisier SIEM. The security team might want the data, but the platform team pays the performance cost without any operational benefit.
Your fancy demo doesn't scale.