What is Endpoint Telemetry?
Endpoint Telemetry is the continuous stream of process, network, file, and authentication events collected by an agent running on a device. It gives security teams the raw evidence needed to detect threats, investigate incidents, and understand what happened on a machine.
What it is
Endpoint telemetry is the structured event data that an agent or sensor records directly on a device and forwards to a central platform. Common event types include:
- Process events: which processes started, their parent processes, command-line arguments, and hashes
- Network events: outbound and inbound connections, DNS queries, and listening ports
- File events: files created, modified, deleted, or renamed, including paths and timestamps
- Authentication events: logon attempts, privilege escalation, and credential use
- Registry events (Windows): key creation, modification, and deletion
Each event is timestamped and tagged with a device identifier, user context, and often a process tree. This makes it possible to reconstruct exactly what a piece of code did on a machine.
Why it matters
Without endpoint telemetry, a security team sees only what reaches the network perimeter. Attackers who move laterally using legitimate tools, run code only in memory, or exfiltrate data over encrypted channels leave little trace at the network layer. Endpoint telemetry closes that gap. It is the foundation that Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platforms are built on. Without high-fidelity telemetry, detection rules and behavioral analytics have nothing to work with. Investigations that would take days of manual log review can be completed in minutes when full process and file event history is available.
How tools address it
EDR platforms deploy a lightweight agent that hooks into the operating system to capture events at the kernel or user-space level. Some platforms, such as agentless Linux EDR tools, collect telemetry without installing a persistent agent by scanning process and file state directly. The agent compresses and forwards events to a cloud or on-premises backend where they are indexed for search and fed into detection engines. Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) may collect a narrower slice of telemetry focused on known-malware signatures, while EDR tools collect broader behavioral data to support threat hunting. File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) tools collect a specific subset of endpoint telemetry focused on file change events.