Silent agent. Visible privacy. Packetman saysWelcome to the end-user experience page. I'm Packetman. The IT lead reading this page has the same question every IT lead has when introducing a new agent into the fleet: "won't users complain?" The honest answer is that DataStun was designed by an engineer who has run security tools on enough machines to know which patterns make users hate them, and the design decisions show. The agent runs silently — no popups, no scans, no scary notifications. Resource footprint is small enough that users do not notice. The tray icon (Windows today, macOS and Linux next) opens a per-device dashboard the user can actually read — they see what we collect about their machine, the destinations their software is reaching, the executables that have run. They have a Help button that opens an AI-fronted support flow with on-device secret scrubbing — passwords, API keys, credit cards stripped before anything leaves the machine. Browsers do not break, video calls do not glitch, no apps refuse to run because of false-positive DLP rules — because we are not a DLP and there is no MITM proxy. The page below covers what users see, what they do not, the tray and /my-device surfaces, the resource footprint, the blocked-flow story (not silent failure), the Help flow, and the apps-do-not-break promise. Every claim here is something an IT lead can verify with one test enrollment on their own machine.

You’ll never know it’s there until you need it.

The IT lead’s pushback question: “won’t users complain?” DataStun was built by an engineer who has run enough security tools on enough machines to know which patterns make users hate them. The design choices that follow show the answer.

Simple enough for grandma, admired by the CTO.

Try it on one machine free Read the trust posture

What users see · what they don’t

✓ What users see

  • A tray icon (Windows; macOS + Linux next).
  • The per-device /my-device dashboard when they open it themselves.
  • A short notification when an outbound connection they tried to make is being blocked — with the destination, the program, and a one-click path to ask their admin about it.
  • The Help button in the tray, which opens an AI-fronted support conversation scoped to their machine.

✕ What users don’t see

  • Pop-ups demanding action (no “agent must restart” nag windows, ever).
  • Scary scan progress bars or virus-found-style modals.
  • Browser certificate warnings, broken video calls, or apps that refuse to run — we’re not a MITM proxy or a DLP.
  • An onboarding wizard. Install runs once, then the agent disappears into the tray.
  • Anything we’re collecting about the contents of their work — we don’t collect that. Why →

The tray icon

Windows ships today; macOS and Linux land in the next quarter. The same five items, the same predictable behaviour, no admin required to use them.

DT

DataStun Agent

v0.5.30 · Connected · G16-LAPTOP-04
Open my device dashboard
Help & support…
Status: Connected · 12,431 flows today
Copy diagnostics bundle
About this agent

No setting-changes from the tray. No hidden right-click menu with elevated commands. The tray is for visibility and help; configuration lives in the admin dashboard where it belongs.

The /my-device dashboard

Click Open my device dashboard in the tray and the user’s browser opens to a per-device page that’s scoped to their machine. No login required — the tray opens it with a one-time dashboard token. Same surface that the admin sees at /agents/<id>, but limited to the user’s own device.

What the user sees

  • Their device’s outbound destinations, ranked worst-grade-first
  • The executables on their device and their reputation verdict
  • Performance grades for connections from their machine
  • The current global blocklist + any flows from their machine that hit a blocked destination (ideally none)
  • A “What does DataStun collect about my device?” section listing every field, with the in-product privacy controls one click away

What the user does not see

  • Other people’s devices on the same tenant
  • Admin-only screens (rule editing, billing, member management)
  • Tenant-wide analytics (org-rollup analytics are admin-only)
  • The actual contents of any of their connections — because we don’t collect content

Resource footprint

Engineered to live next to a real EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Defender for Endpoint) without competing for resources. Numbers below are real measurements on a typical mid-range corporate laptop.

ResourceMeasurementNotes
CPU (steady state)< 0.5%Background flow polling, every few seconds; spikes briefly during blocklist refresh.
RAM (resident)~ 35 MBSingle Go process; no JVM, no Electron.
Disk I/O~ 0 KB/sNo full-session pcap. Local state in %ProgramData%\DataTravel is < 5 MB.
Network (telemetry up)~ 5 KB/sCompressed flow batches every minute; less when the device is idle.
Network (blocklist down)~ 60 KB/minDelta-only updates; full refresh once per restart.
Boot impact< 200 msService starts after the network stack; no delay to login.

Architectural rule: the agent never causes the problem it’s measuring. The heavy lifting — packet decode, AI inference, DPI, and long-term storage — lives on server-side infrastructure, not the endpoint. The one exception, Advanced Packet Diagnostics, is opt-in per test: the agent records a brief, filtered capture using tooling already on the device, then uploads it and deletes the local copy — no capture software installed, no full-session pcap, nothing left behind.

When something gets blocked

A blocked outbound flow is not a silent failure. The user sees a clear, friendly notification with the information they need to either keep working or escalate.

Step 1

Block enforced at OS firewall. The flow refuses on the kernel side. The application’s connect() returns “refused” instead of timing out — users get a fast clear failure, not a thirty-second hang.

Step 2

Notification fires. The user sees a tray notification: “Connection to example-bad.com from chrome.exe was blocked — this destination is on the global threat list.” Notification includes a link to the user’s /my-device Blocked tab for context.

Step 3

One-click escalation if it’s wrong. If the user thinks the block is incorrect, the Blocked tab has a “Tell my admin this is wrong” button that opens a pre-filled support thread with the destination, the program, the timestamp, and the user’s description. Admin sees it in their inbox; the user sees the resolution thread.

Step 4

Admin resolves. Admin can override the block tenant-wide (one click) and the change propagates to every agent in the tenant within 60 seconds. The user gets a follow-up notification when the destination is unblocked.

Help & support — with on-device secret scrubbing

Click Help & support in the tray. The browser opens to /account/support, authenticated to the user’s specific device. AI assistant answers first; admin escalation is one click; central DataStun support is two.

What the user sees they didn’t send

Before any support message leaves the user’s machine, an on-device scrubber strips patterns that look like credit cards, API keys, private-key PEM blocks, password-field values, Basic / Bearer auth headers, and database connection-string passwords. The user sees the scrub markers in their own message — so they know what didn’t leave their device, before they send it.

My agent crashed. Here’s the connection string it was trying:
postgres://app:[REDACTED:password]@db.internal:5432/prod

And here’s the bearer header from my .env:
Authorization: Bearer [REDACTED:bearer-token]

The credit card I was testing was [REDACTED:credit-card]

Scrubbing happens before transit, not on the server. The redactions are visible to the user so they can verify what stayed local. Read the support-flow glossary →

Apps that don’t break

No MITM proxy, no SSL stripping, no DLP-style content inspection — so the long list of apps that other security tools quietly break just keep working.

Browsers

Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox: no certificate warnings. We don’t intercept TLS.

Video calls

Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, WebEx: no stutters or quality drops. We don’t buffer media flows.

VPNs

WireGuard, OpenVPN, Tailscale, corporate VPNs: tunnel traffic passes through normally.

Developer tools

Git, npm / pip / cargo / brew, Docker, Kubernetes CLIs: no cert pinning errors, no proxy config to manage.

SSH / remote

SSH, RDP, VNC, Tailscale SSH: no inspection of session content.

Personal apps

Streaming, gaming, social, banking: no content inspection of TLS-protected traffic.

If a flow gets blocked because the destination is on the global threat-IP list, the application sees a fast connection refused — it doesn’t hang and it doesn’t silently corrupt. The user gets a tray notification explaining what happened and a path to escalate if it’s wrong.

Roll out to one machine first

The fastest way to answer “will users complain?” is to enroll your own machine. Individual tier covers 3 agents with a 30-day trial; the experience above is fully exercised on a single device.