Secure Events

The Events page in Sysdig Secure provides overview of the entire infrastructure, and the ability to deep-dive into specific security events, identify false positives, and configure policies to optimize performance.

It provides a navigable interface to:

• Find and surface insights around the most relevant security events in your infrastructure

• Slice and dice your event data using multiple filters and scopes to hone into the events that will require further inspection or remediation actions

• Inspect any items using an advanced event detail panel

• Follow up on forensics, activity audits, etc., by directly linking to other sections of the product for additional event information

Without filters or scope defined, the event list comprises all events within the timeline, in chronological order. Clicking on an event opens the event detail panel on the right.

Review Summary and Filter Secure Events

The panel at the top of the page, together with the time-span selector at the bottom, provide a high-level summary of the events during the chosen timeframe– anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 days or more.

The summary shows the:

• Top number of events per Cluster, Node, Namespace, Workload, Image, plus by Rule name or MITRE attack

• Number of events by severity (High/Med/Low/Info)

  By default, High, Med, and Low are selected. Deselect to see, for example, just High severity events.

• Group-by selector: currently, you can choose to group the events list by Policy.

Click elements to add them to filter expressions (see below).

Using the Filter Bar

Building expressions in the improved filter bar is simpler and cleaner than in the original filter UI. Both use the Filter Expression Elements described below.

• Build expressions from the drop-down options: Click Add Filter for an initial drop-down list of valid scope elements. Keep clicking in the filter bar to be presented with the next logical operand, value, etc. to add to your expression.

  

• Build expressions using elements from the Events list: Click the operand after an element in an event to add it directly to the filter expression.

  

• Add priority or type filters and save a constructed expression as a Favorite or set as the Default filter

Understanding Filter Expression Elements

Note that the filters are additive. For example, if you set the Type to Image Scanning events and don’t see what you expected, make sure the scope and time span have also been set appropriately.

You construct a filtering expression from the following elements:

Scope

By default, the Event scope encompasses Everywhere, but you can define the environment scope(containers, namespaces, etc.) to limit the range. Those environment limits are assigned to the team active during the scope definition.

See also: Team Scope and the Event Feed, below.

Free-Text Search

You can search by the event title and scope label values, such as “my-cluster-name,” visible in the events lists.

Type

Events include both Runtime and Image Scanning events.

Runtime events correspond to the rules and violations defined in Policies.

Image Scanning events correspond to the runtime scanning alerts.

Severity

Use the appropriate buttons to filter events by High, Medium, Low, and Info level of severity, corresponding to the levels defined in the relevant runtime Policies or runtime scanning alerts.

Group by

When a particular policy is generating many events, use the Group by: Policy option to sort the event feed into a more useable list.

Time Span

As in the rest of the Sysdig Platform interface, the time span can be set by date ranges using the calendar pop-up, and in increments from 10 minutes to 3 days. You can additionally use the calendar picker to select other time ranges that are not available as fast buttons.

Attributes

Under Details, hover over an attribute to reveal the =/!= filter button and click to add to the Attribute filter.

Event Detail Panel

The Event Detail contents vary depending on the selected event. In general, the following are always present:

• Attributes on which you can filter directly:

  See the Attributes, above.

• Action Buttons, sometimes grouped under “Respond”:

  Only relevant activity links are displayed for each event detail.

  • If relevant, the Captures button links to Captures. See also: Quick Link to Captures from Runtime Events.

  • If set up in the associated policy, a View Runbook link or button connects your company’s procedure documents. The image below shows how it may appear as a single button or under Respond, depending how many actions have been enabled.

    

  • For Runtime events, the Activity shortcut button is available and links to Activity Audit.

  • For Image Scanning, the Scan Results shortcut links to the Scan Results page.

  • For a birds-eye view of the related network activity and the ability to create a netsec policy, the Network Activity shortcut links to the Netsec page. See also: Quick Link to Netsec Typology.

  • For auto-tuning policies to reduce noisy false positives, the Tunable Events shortcut provides a link the Runtime Policy Tuner. Note that the tuner only detects and alerts on rules that have exception definition, so the link does not necessarily appear on every event. See also: Quick Link to Policy Tuner.

• Edit Policy Shortcut:

  • For image scanning: Links to the runtime alert that generated the event.

  • For policy (runtime) events: Links to the runtime rule that created the event, as well as the rule type (i.e. Falco - Syscall) and the labels associated with that rule.

  All three elements are filterable using the attribute filter widgets (see above).

• View Rule

  Click the View Rule button to slide the out the rule detail panel for review.

  

• Scope

  The new scope selector allows for additional selector logic (in, not in, contains, starts-with, etc), improving the scoping flexibility over previous versions. This scope selector also provides scope variables, allowing you to quickly switch between, for example, Kubernetes namespaces without having to edit the panel scope. See also: Team Scope and the Event Feed, below.

  Note that the scope details listed can be entered in the free-text search field if desired.

• Portable URLs

  The Event Feed URL maintains the current filters, scope, and selected elements. You can share this URL with other users to allow them to display the same data.

Live/Pause Button

When live, events continually update. Use Pause to focus on a section of the screen and not continue scrolling away in a noisy environment.

Quick Link to Captures from Runtime Events

For runtime policy events that have an associated capture, we now offer a contextual menu for performing quick actions over the event capture, rather than a simple link to the Captures interface. You can:

• View the capture directly in Sysdig Inspect

• Directly download or delete the capture

Additionally, if the event is scoped to a particular container, Sysdig Inspect will automatically filter the displayed information to the scope of that Container ID.

Quick Link to Netsec Topology

As part of triaging an event, it may be useful to get a birds-eye-view of the network activity, e.g., to establish what is connected to what, who else a service communicates with, and whether the connection is expected or an outlier.

When relevant, the event detail Respond button provides a quick link to the Network Activity topology, visible users with Advanced User privileges or above, as well as the ability for administrators to craft a unique netsec policy as needed.

The event should include cluster/ namespace/workload details (one of deployment, daemonset, statefulset, job, cronjob ), and actual network activity on the workload for the Network Activity link to be offered.

Quick Link to Policy Tuner

Sysdig’s Runtime Policy Tuner helps reduce noisy false negatives using rule exceptions. If you have not enabled the tuner, the Events overview will include a link for enabling.

Once enabled, the Event detail will show a # Tunable Exceptions link, sometimes grouped under the Respond button. Click the link to get the Tuner suggestions and apply as desired.

Team Scope and the Event Feed

Not every label available in the Sysdig Platform is compatible with the set of labels used to define the scope of a security event in the Event Feed.

Practically, this means that in order to correctly determine if a set of events is visible for a certain Sysdig Secure team, the team scope must not use any label outside the following list.

Permitted Labels

agent.tag.* (any label starting with agent.tag is valid)

host.hostName
host.mac

kubernetes.cluster.name
kubernetes.namespace.name
kubernetes.node.name
kubernetes.namespace.label.field.cattle.io/projectId
kubernetes.namespace.label.project

kubernetes.pod.name
kubernetes.daemonSet.name
kubernetes.deployment.name
kubernetes.replicaSet.name
kubernetes.statefulSet.name
kubernetes.job.name
kubernetes.cronJob.name
kubernetes.service.name

container.name
container.image.id
container.image.repo
container.image.tag
container.image.digest

container.label.io.kubernetes.container.name
container.label.io.kubernetes.pod.name
container.label.io.kubernetes.pod.namespace
container.label.maintainer

Not using any label to define team scope (Everywhere) is also supported.

If the Secure team scope is defined using a label outside of the list above, the Event Feed will be empty for that particular team.