fleet/cmd/osquery-perf

Osquery Server Performance Tester

This is a tool to generate realistic traffic to an osquery management server (primarily, Fleet). With this tool, many thousands of hosts can be simulated from a single host.

Requirements

The only requirement for running this tool is a working installation of Go.

Usage

Typically go run is used.

You can use --help to view the available configuration:

go run agent.go --help

The tool should be invoked with the appropriate enroll secret. A typical invocation looks like:

go run agent.go --enroll_secret hgh4hk3434l2jjf

When starting many hosts, it is a good idea to extend the intervals, and also the period over which the hosts are started:

go run agent.go --enroll_secret hgh4hk3434l2jjf --host_count 5000 --start_period 5m --query_interval 60s --config_interval 5m

This will start 5,000 hosts over a period of 5 minutes. Each host will check in for live queries at a 1 minute interval, and for configuration at a 5 minute interval. Starting over a 5 minute period ensures that the configuration requests are spread evenly over the 5 minute interval.

It can be useful to start the "same" hosts. This can be achieved with the --seed parameter:

go run agent.go --enroll_secret hgh4hk3434l2jjf --seed 0

By using the same seed, along with other values, we usually get hosts that look the same to the server. This is not guaranteed, but it is a useful technique.

By default, all hosts will simulate macOS hosts (specifically, macOS 10.14). To simulate hosts using other operating systems, use the --os_templates flag. This flag takes a comma-separated list of host template names and will start hosts by alternating in the list of OS templates when multiple templates are specified. For example:

go run agent.go --enroll_secret hgh4hk3434l2jjf --os_templates ubuntu_22.04,windows_11 --host_count 6

would start 3 Ubuntu hosts and 3 Windows hosts. See the os_templates flag description in go run agent.go --help for the list of supported template names.

Controlling Agent Behavior From the Fleet UI

Specify Query Results

Using the naming convention MyQuery_10 (name separated by _number) will instruct agents to return 10 rows for that query

Control policy pass/fail per policy

In the Policy SQL:

• select 1 will instruct agents to send back only passing responses
• select 0 will instruct agents to send back only failing responses

Running Locally (Development Environment)

First, ensure your Fleet local development environment is up and running. Refer to Building Fleet for details. Once this is done:

• navigate to the Hosts tab of your Fleet web interface (typically, this would be at https://localhost:8080/hosts/manage).
• click on "Manage enroll secret" and copy the enroll secret.
• start the osquery-perf agent (from the root of the Fleet repository, it would be go run ./cmd/osquery-perf/agent.go --enroll_secret <paste-the-secret>).

Alternatively, you can retrieve the enroll secret from the command-line using fleetctl get enroll_secret (you may have to login to fleetctl first).

The agent will start. You can connect to MySQL to view changes made to the development database by the agent (e.g., at the terminal, with docker-compose exec mysql mysql -uroot -ptoor -Dfleet). Remember that frequency of the reported data depends on the configuration of the Fleet instance, so you may want to start it with shorter delays for some cases and enable debug logging (e.g., ./build/fleet serve --dev --logging_debug --osquery_detail_update_interval 1m).

Resource Limits

On many systems, trying to simulate a large number of hosts will result in hitting system resource limits (such as number of open file descriptors).

If you see errors such as dial tcp: lookup localhost: no such host or read: connection reset by peer, try increasing these limits.

macOS

Run the following command in the shell before running the Fleet server and before running agent.go (run it once in each shell):

ulimit -n 64000