Fleet user stories

Jason Walton — Director of information security @ Schrödinger

Jason Walton gives us some insight into how his team uses Fleet and osquery at Schrödinger.

How did you first get started using osquery?

I became aware of osquery a number of years ago — maybe 2017 when a colleague mentioned it. I experimented with it locally, and it was very interesting, but I never invested much time until I discovered Fleet (then Kolide Fleet) I believe around 2018.

Why are you using Fleet?

It’s easy to deploy and use in combination with Launcher. It provides me with a single source of truth about endpoints in my organization, and provides a separate “reporting plane” independent of tools used to configure or manage systems. Aggregating data across platforms is also extremely helpful.

How do your end users feel about Fleet?

Our end users don’t notice it’s there — and we have extremely technical end users. This differs from other tools like our EDR solution which can occasionally cause performance issues. It’s a very lightweight tool.

How are you dealing with alert fatigue and false positives from your SIEM?

We actually don’t use a SIEM for this reason. We rely on alerts and signals from individual tools that have high fidelity.