edr-loadgen

Simple load generator for stress-testing EDR software

The purpose of this tool is to measure CPU overhead incurred by having active or passive security monitoring technologies. Examples are auditd, auditbeat, auditd+Laurel Sysmon for Linux, or any EDR.

Originally written for use on Linux systems, edr-loadgen also supports CPU overhead measurements on Windows.

It spawns trivial processes at a set frequency for a set time and measures user + system CPU usage for a set of given processes. The process is passed a special environment variable, EDR_LOADGEN=1, so edr-loadgen can safely exec itself to generate load.

Example:

$ ./edr-loadgen -command /bin/true -delay .005 -duration 30 $(pidof auditd; pidof laurel)
2021/10/20 16:42:34 ./edr-loadgen: exec '/bin/true', every 0.0050 seconds, duration: 30.0000 seconds
2021/10/20 16:42:34 CLK_TCK = 100
2021/10/20 16:43:04 5977 events generated.
2021/10/20 16:43:04 PID 8062: user+sys: 0.43+0.70 = 1.13 seconds / 1.433+2.333 = 3.767 percent
2021/10/20 16:43:04 PID 18249: user+sys: 0.78+0.08 = 0.86 seconds / 2.600+0.267 = 2.867 percent
2021/10/20 16:43:04 SUM: 1.99 seconds / 6.633 percent

A CSV report can be generated (-report FILENAME). It contains the following fields:

• UNIX timestamp
• number of events (per -delay, -duration parameters)
• number of events actually generated
• PID
• process command line
• user time, system (kernel) time, sum (seconds)
• user time, system (kernel) time, sum (%CPU)

Author

Hilko Bengen <bengen@hilluzination.de>

License

GPL-3.0, see LICENSE