starboard-exporter

Exposes Prometheus metrics from Starboard's VulnerabilityReport custom resources (CRs).

Metrics

This exporter exposes two types of metrics:

Summary

A summary series exposes the count of CVEs of each severity reported in a given VulnerabilityReport. For example:

starboard_exporter_vulnerabilityreport_image_vulnerability_severity_count{
    image_digest="",
    image_namespace="demo",
    image_registry="quay.io",
    image_repository="giantswarm/starboard-operator",
    image_tag="0.11.0",
    report_name="replicaset-starboard-app-6894945788-starboard-app",
    severity="MEDIUM"
    } 4

This indicates that the giantswarm/starboard-operator image in the demo namespace contains 4 medium-severity vulnerabilities.

Detail / Vulnerability

A detail or vulnerability series exposes fields from each instance of an Aqua Vulnerability. The value of the metric is the Score for the vulnerability. For example:

starboard_exporter_vulnerabilityreport_image_vulnerability{
    fixed_resource_version="1.1.1l-r0",
    image_digest="",
    image_namespace="demo",
    image_registry="quay.io",
    image_repository="giantswarm/starboard-operator",
    image_tag="0.11.0",
    installed_resource_version="1.1.1k-r0",
    report_name="replicaset-starboard-app-6894945788-starboard-app",
    severity="HIGH",
    vulnerability_id="CVE-2021-3712",
    vulnerability_link="https://avd.aquasec.com/nvd/cve-2021-3712",
    vulnerability_title="openssl: Read buffer overruns processing ASN.1 strings",vulnerable_resource_name="libssl1.1"
    } 7.4

This indicates that the vulnerability with the id CVE-2021-3712 was found in the giantswarm/starboard-operator image in the demo namespace, and it has a CVSS 3.x score of 7.4.

An additional series would be exposed for every combination of those labels.

A Note on Cardinality

For some use cases, it is helpful to export additional fields from VulnerabilityReport CRs. However, because many fields contain unbounded arbitrary data, including them in Prometheus metrics can lead to extremely high cardinality. This can drastically impact Prometheus performance. For this reason, we only expose summary data by default and allow users to opt-in to higher-cardinality fields.

One vulnerabilityreport per deployment

By default, Starboard generates a VulnerabilityReport per ReplicaSet in a Deployment. This can cause confusion because vulnerabilities are still reported for Pods which no longer exist, i.e. you fix a CVE in your latest Deployment but the number of CVEs per Deployment stays the same in your metrics.

As of Starboard v0.14.0, the environment variable OPERATOR_VULNERABILITY_SCANNER_SCAN_ONLY_CURRENT_REVISIONS can be enabled to only generate a VulnerabilityReport from the latest ReplicaSet in the Deployment.

Check the Starboard configuration docs for more information.

Customization

Summary metrics of the format described above are always enabled.

To enable an additional detail series per Vulnerability, use the --target-labels flag to specify which labels should be exposed. For example:

# Expose only select image and CVE fields.
--target-labels=image_namespace,image_repository,image_tag,vulnerability_id

# Run with (almost) all fields exposed as labels, if you're feeling really wild.
--target-labels=all

Target labels can also be set via Helm values:

exporter:
  vulnerabilityReports:
    targetLabels:
      - image_namespace
      - image_repository
      - image_tag
      - vulnerability_id
      - ...

Helm

How to install the starboard-exporter using helm:

helm repo add giantswarm https://giantswarm.github.io/giantswarm-catalog
helm repo update
helm upgrade -i starboard-exporter --namespace <starboard namespace> giantswarm/starboard-exporter