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Often when I engage with a prospect their first question is “How many events per second (EPS) can EventTracker handle?” People tend to confuse EPS with scalability so by simply giving back an enormous-enough number (usually larger than the previous vendor they spoke with) it convinces them your product is, indeed, scalable. The fact is scalability and Events per Second (EPS) are not the same and many vendors get away from the real scalability issue by intentionally using the two interchangeably. A high EPS rating does not guarantee a scalable solution.If the only measure of scalability available is an EPS rating, you as a prospect should be asking yourself a simple question. What is the vendor definition of EPS? You will generally find that the answer is different with each vendor.

  • Is it number of events scanned/second?
  • Is it number of events received/second?
  • Is it number of events processed/second?
  • Is it number of events inserted in the event store/second?
  • Is it a real time count or a batch transfer count?
  • What is the size of these events? Is it some small non-representative size, for instance, 100 bytes per event or is it a real event like a windows event which may vary from 1000 to 6,000 bytes?
  • Are you receiving these events in UDP mode or TCP mode?
  • Are they measuring running correlation rules against the event stream? How many rules are being run?
  • And let’s not even talk about how fast the reporting function runs, EPS does not measure that at all.

At the end of the day, an EPS measure is generally a measure of a small, non-typical normalized event received. Nothing measured about actually doing something useful with the event, and indeed, pretty much useless.

With the lack of definition of what an event actually is, EPS is also a terrible comparative measure. You cannot assume that one vendor claiming 12,000EPS is faster than another claiming 10,000EPS as they are often measuring very different things. A good analogy would be if you asked someone how far away an object was, and they replied 100. For all the usefulness of the EPS measure the unit could be inches or miles.

EPS is even worse for ascertaining true solution capability. Some vendors market appliances that promise 2,000 EPS and 150 GB disk space for log storage. They also promise to archive security events for multiple years to meet compliance. For the sake of argument let’s assume the system is receiving, processing and storing 1000 windows events/sec with an average 1K event size (a common size for a Windows event). In 24 hours you will receive 86 million events. Compressed at 90% this consumes 8.6GB or almost 7% of your storage in a single day. Even with heavy compression it can handle only a few weeks of data with this kind of load. Think of buying a car with an engine that can race to 200MPH and a set of tires and suspension that cannot go faster that 75MPH. The car can’t go 200, the engine can, but the car can’t. A SIEM solution is the car in this example, not the engine. Having the engine does not do you any good at all.

So when asked about EPS, I sigh, and say it depends, and try to explain all this. Sometimes it sinks in, sometimes not. All in all don’t pay a lot of attention to EPS – it is largely an empty measure until the unit of measure is standardized, and even then it will only be a small part of overall system capability.

–Steve Lafferty

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