Zscaler using 2+ Mbps continuously on wife's work laptop

VPN
1

My wife’s work laptop (she works from home) has Zscaler on it and regularly uses 2 Mbps or more of outbound bandwidth, continuously, while it’s on. Sometimes it doesn’t do this, but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason as to when it does. Most days it is uploading continuously. It amounts to 15 GB or more of traffic each day. We have FIOS gigabit service, so it doesn’t actually affect our use of the Internet much, and Verizon hasn’t complained, but I am mystified and aghast at this level of data usage. I can’t figure out what is using that much data. At first I assumed it was Windows Update sharing to other machines on the “LAN” (which would be her corporate LAN because she VPNs in) but Windows Update doesn’t show that much traffic being used. Also not OneDrive, as pausing sync had no effect on the machine’s usage. I had her set the WiFi connection as metered with no effect.

I’ve encouraged her to take this issue to her IT department, but in the meantime, I just wanted to check here and see if this is normal, and if so, what the actual fuck. In the meantime, I have a schedule on my eero to pause the machine’s Internet access during non-work hours, and have encouraged her to actually shut the machine down when she’s done for the day.

2

Sounds like her company’s IT staff need to look into it (starting with looking at the ZDX console)…

3

You do realize Zscaler is simply just tunneling something her machine is doing to the internet.

I would dig more into task manager / activity monitor (unsure on the OS) to see what apps are running and what they could be consuming.

Almost sounds like zoom is uploading video :upside_down_face:.

I just looked at my firewalla and my MacBooks idle at like 0-30Kbps right now.

4

Ironically, Zscaler admin will probably be able to see exactly what’s chewing up the bandwidth.

5

It might be some employee monitoring software, pretty common these days. You have no right to privacy on a work machine.

And Verizon will give precisely zero thought to this, it’s nothing.

6

Zscaler is going to “suck bandwidth up” because it’s the next hop for your internet. So anything and I mean anything can be routed through there which in your case it’s probably an app or just normal windows chatter to update servers etc.

7

If Windows 11 is installed you can see network bandwidth consumption by process in Task Manager.

8

Could be something like Onedrive constantly syncing an open document/file?

9

I look forward to the day that this classifies as a problem I would actually spend time on.

10

It’s likely a variety of corporate endpoint tools phoning home and/or out to the cloud.

Her IT can easily look and see what the traffic is. Zscaler will send some analytic data, but it’s very small, so this is probably her corporate apps.

11

Yea. A doorbell cam uses as much throughput.

12

don’t see anything here, which implies something running as another user. backup maybe?

13

Doesn’t seem to be. When I paused OneDrive syncing it didn’t affect the outbound traffic.

14

Zscaler is only active for one user and in the user space. It doesn’t run as a system process.