How Zen Works: Performance & Reliability

Performance Impact

At Zen, we prioritize your application's performance. Our agents are designed to have minimal impact on your systems, and we continuously monitor this through testing, automated benchmarks and using Zen ourselves.

Reliability & Failsafes

Zen is designed to maintain security and performance even when facing connectivity issues with the Aikido platform. Here's how Zen handles different scenarios:

When Zen Starts Without Server Connection

✅ Your application continues running normally
✅ Basic attack blocking (sql, path injection, ..) remain active
⚠️ Some advanced security features (bot detection, threat actors, ..) may be limited until connection is restored

During Normal Operation If Zen Loses Connection

✅ All existing security configurations remain active
✅ Your application continues running without interruption
✅ Previously downloaded security rules stay in effect
⚠️ New security updates will queue until connection resumes

Request Processing

✅ All security checks happen locally on your machine
✅ No dependency on Zen server response times. Zen talks to Aikido servers in a background process and not for each request.

Configuration Updates

Zen maintains strict validation of all configuration updates to ensure:

✅ Only valid configurations are applied
✅ Invalid configurations are safely rejected
✅ Your security posture remains stable

Best Practices

Keep your Zen agent updated to the latest version
Monitor your application logs for any Zen-related messages
Contact support if you notice any unexpected behavior

Blocking traffic by country with Zen Firewall

Vanta Compliance integration