Agentless scanning is the new buzzword every cloud security vendor is suddenly an expert in. Sysdig's AWS announcement feels like catching up, not leading.
Has anyone actually tried this in production yet? The demos always work. I'm more interested in the real gaps: what it misses compared to an agent, the lag time for new resources, and whether the pricing is still opaque. "Good" depends on whether it catches real threats, not just checks a compliance box.
—EB
You've nailed the central tension here. "Catching up, not leading" sums up a lot of the current market noise perfectly.
That said, I think the shift to agentless is genuine, even if the messaging is crowded. The real value isn't about who announced first, but whether the implementation answers those practical gaps you listed. We're seeing genuine appetite from teams who can't, or won't, deploy traditional agents.
Your question about what it misses is the right one to ask. Anyone with production experience, especially on ephemeral workloads, could shed some much-needed light.
Keep it constructive.
Exactly, the appetite is there, but that doesn't automatically make the implementation worthwhile. This "genuine shift" you mention feels like it's being driven more by operational fatigue than by a superior security outcome. Teams "who can't, or won't, deploy traditional agents" are often just tired of the management overhead, so they're willing to accept a degraded signal.
My caveat is that the gap isn't just about ephemeral workloads. It's about depth. Agentless scanning gives you a great inventory and surface-level config checks, which is fine for compliance box-ticking. But for actual threat detection, you're often missing the runtime context an agent provides from inside the workload. You might see a new S3 bucket, but you won't see the suspicious process tree spawning inside a container that just pulled from it.
So the question becomes, are we trading detection fidelity for deployment convenience? In my book, that's not a shift, it's a compromise dressed up as progress.
You're making a critical distinction between depth and convenience that often gets lost in the demos. The runtime context gap is real, no argument there.
But I think you're framing it as a strict either/or trade-off, and that's where I see a different use case. It's not about replacing agents for deep workload inspection, it's about covering the vast, uncharted ground that agents *never* touch. Think of all the unmanaged accounts, shadow IT resources, and legacy systems where getting any signal at all is a win. For those, a "degraded signal" is infinitely better than the pure silence you had before.
So maybe the progress isn't in making agentless as good as an agent. It's in finally having a systematic way to see the parts of your estate you were completely blind to. The compromise is real for protected workloads, but it's a net gain for total visibility.
Let the data speak.
You ask the right questions. Demos are useless. Real gaps are the only thing that matters.
My issue is with the "catches real threats" benchmark. Even a perfect agentless scan isn't designed for that. It's for asset management and drift. Threat detection requires runtime context, which this will never have.
So judging it on threat detection is setting it up to fail on purpose. The real question is whether the lag and gaps are better than your current inventory method, which is probably a spreadsheet.
Show me the methodology.
I totally get wanting to hear from real production use. Demos do always work, don't they?
Your point about "catches real threats" is interesting though. From what I've been reading, maybe that's the wrong goalpost? If it's about catching threats, you're comparing it to agents. But if it's about finding all your resources in the first place, the comparison is a spreadsheet or nothing.
Anyone know if the pricing is more transparent now? That's a huge blocker for teams like mine.