Not All Sensors Are Built the Same | Uptycs Blog

Why Uptycs’ Unified Sensor Delivers More Power, Less Overhead

In cloud-native security, visibility is everything. What your sensor can see—and how efficiently it captures, correlates, and acts on that data—determines how effectively you can protect your workloads, identities, and infrastructure.

At Uptycs, we engineered a single, unified sensor designed to deliver deep telemetry, real-time protection, and unmatched efficiency across cloud, containers, endpoints, and CI/CD pipelines.

Because when it comes to performance, scalability, and insight—not all sensors are built the same.

One Sensor. Many Capabilities.

While other platforms bolt together multiple agents to handle posture, runtime, and detection, Uptycs takes a different approach: one footprint, full visibility.

Our single, extensible sensor powers:

• Runtime protection for containers, VMs, and hosts
• Cloud & Kubernetes Security Posture Management (CSPM/KSPM)
• Extended Detection and Response (EDR/XDR) across operating systems
• File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) and compliance tracking
• Behavioral analytics for abnormal process and identity activity
• eBPF-based kernel-level visibility for rich runtime telemetry
• OSQuery-powered intelligence for structured, queryable insights
• SDLC integration to correlate build-time and runtime data

One sensor. One data model. One unified platform.

Lightweight by Design — Heavyweight in Value

Security shouldn’t slow your business down. The Uptycs sensor is engineered for speed, scale, and efficiency.

• Low resource footprint: Optimized CPU and memory utilization across containers and hosts
• eBPF event streaming: Kernel-level insight without intrusive system hooks
• Edge normalization: Compresses and correlates data before sending to the cloud
• Adaptive collection: Dynamically adjusts telemetry based on workload activity

Customers report measurable reductions in cloud costs and system overhead, while gaining deeper visibility and faster detection.

OSQuery + eBPF: The Best of Both Worlds

Uptycs merges OSQuery’s structured, queryable model with eBPF’s real-time kernel visibility, forming the backbone of our telemetry architecture.

• OSQuery captures process, package, and configuration context in SQL-like tables.
• eBPF delivers granular, real-time monitoring of system calls and network activity.

Together, they provide a complete, correlated picture of your infrastructure—from static state to runtime behavior—enabling faster, more accurate detection and investigation.

Smart Detection: Knowing Normal from Abnormal

Telemetry without context is noise. Uptycs’ sensor distinguishes normal from abnormal behavior through behavioral baselining and correlation:

• Learns baseline activity across workloads, users, and clusters
• Flags deviations like unexpected shell spawns or unusual network flows
• Maps alerts to MITRE ATT&CK techniques and correlates with asset and identity data
• Reduces false positives and surfaces meaningful threats in real time

This intelligence allows your team to focus on what matters—and act with precision.

Deploy Once. See Everything.

Uptycs makes deployment easy. Our sensor installs in minutes across:

• AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI workloads
• Kubernetes clusters and containers
• Linux, Windows, and macOS systems
• CI/CD and supply chain environments

Once deployed, it immediately starts building a full map of your software development lifecycle (SDLC)—from code to runtime—to detect risk early and correlate it across the entire environment.

From Policy to Protection

Visibility means nothing without control. Uptycs allows you to codify and enforce security guardrails across your organization:

• Define and deploy custom security policies
• Automatically enforce posture baselines for workloads and clouds
• Detect and block violations in real time
• Map incidents back to pipelines, images, or roles for faster remediation

With policy enforcement integrated into the same sensor and platform, teams move from detect and respond to predict and prevent.

Mapping the Full SDLC

The Bottom Line: Smarter. Lighter. Stronger.

When performance, visibility, and scalability matter—your sensor should work with your environment, not against it.

Uptycs’ unified sensor delivers:

• Real-time runtime protection
• Deep, correlated telemetry
• Unified CSPM, KSPM, and XDR capabilities
• Full SDLC coverage
• Policy enforcement and posture control
• Reduced cost and resource consumption

Because in modern cloud security, speed and simplicity win—and not all sensors are built the same.