Looking for Advice on Optimizing Zeek Scripts

Zeek
1

Hey everyone!

I hope you’re all doing well. I’m diving deeper into Zeek and am looking for some advice on optimizing my Zeek scripts. I’ve been working on a few custom scripts for network monitoring, but I’m running into performance issues as the volume of data increases.

Also I have gone through these resources/articles I Need Guidance on Optimizing Zeek for High-Traffic Environments Mendix Tutorial however, they are quite useful but I want to learn from community.

Do you have any tips or best practices for optimizing Zeek scripts? Are there specific approaches or techniques you’ve found useful to improve performance and efficiency? I’m particularly interested in any experiences you have with handling large datasets and tuning script performance.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions you can provide!

Cheers,

2

Hi there!

If you tell us a little more about what kinds of performance problems you’re encountering, we can give you specific advice. We don’t have a cookbook-style assortment of tips, unfortunately (though we’d welcome help on one! :slight_smile:), but there are lots of tips & tricks the community has figured out over the years.

If you can point us at some code that’s ideal, but we understand that’s not always feasible. For smaller examples you can use https://try.zeek.org.

In the meantime make sure to read our docs, particularly the sections on scripting and troubleshooting, and check out our library of ZeekWeek talks here.

Finally, if you’re using Zeek 7, you can check out our new built-in script optimizer, ZAM, see here — but the degree to which it’ll help you depends a lot on your particular performance issue.

Best,
Christian