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Info: How will the Venafi Server Agent impact my Production Systems?

Applies To:

Venafi Server Agent 16.2 

Summary:

To help you better understand the impact of deploying the Venafi Server Agent into your production environment, this article includes both general guidelines as well as specific data-points gathered through benchmark testing.

Use the sample information in this article as a starting point to help you prepare your production systems for Server Agent deployment. 

More Info:

Based on several factors, the resource footprint of the agent varies from customer to customer and system to system. Consider the following factors:

  • The type of work being performed by the Server Agent
  • The frequency in which the Server Agent is scheduled to perform the work
  • The number of certificates and keys on a system
  • (For Discovery Only) The amount of files and folders the agent is configured to scan while looking for certificates and keys
  • The performance ability of the Trust Protection Platform server with which the Server Agent is configured to communicate

The Server Agent is designed to be lightweight, to perform assigned work quickly, and to have minimal impact on the host system.

Certificate Discovery Test Setup:

On the test system used in writing this article, we made sure that no third-party software or services were running. The Server Agent ran as a Medium priority process. This allowed us to notice any CPU spikes during the test. On production systems where other software (and services) might be running as either Medium or High Priority processes, the duration of the work would likely take longer. Because of how the operating system manages system resources, you might not see a spike in CPU utilization. 

Sample Test System Configuration

Operating System Centos 6.7 64-bit
Virtualization environment VMWare
CPU 1 Logical CPU
Memory 2GB RAM
System HDD 20GB
System Drive Disk Transfer Rate 156 MB/sec
Directories Scanned 7
Files Scanned  1,013 Files
Keystore Types Berkeley, IBM CMS, JKS, PEM, PKCS7, PKCS12
Discovery Schedule On Receipt
Discovery Folder Path /Certs/CertificateDiscoveryBenchmark
include all subfolders
Certificate Placement Certificates were placed in the Policy Root
Other Discovery Job Settings If not defined, were left at their defaults
Other Third Party software/services on System None

 

Certificate Discovery Test Results:

Averages of 10 runs

Avg. Length of Certificate Discovery 20.33 seconds
Average memory 8,189 KB
Average CPU 13.3%
Peak memory 9611 KB
Peak CPU 61.9%

 

Agent Check-in with TPP Test Results:

Averages of 10 runs

Avg. Length of Certificate Discovery 2.1 seconds
Average memory 8,593 KB
Average CPU 4.54%
Peak memory 11,533 KB
Peak CPU 10.0%

 

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