Operational Container Scanning (ULTIMATE ALL)

• Introduced in GitLab 14.8.
• Deprecated the starboard directive in GitLab 15.4. The starboard directive is scheduled for removal in GitLab 16.0.

Enable operational container scanning

You can use operational container scanning to scan container images in your cluster for security vulnerabilities. You can enable the scanner to run on a cadence as configured via the agent config, or setup scan execution policies within a project that houses the agent.

NOTE: If both agent config and scan execution policies are configured, the configuration from scan execution policy takes precedence.

Enable via agent configuration

To enable scanning of images within your Kubernetes cluster via the agent configuration, add a container_scanning configuration block to your agent configuration with a cadence field containing a CRON expression for when the scans are run.

container_scanning:
  cadence: '0 0 * * *' # Daily at 00:00 (Kubernetes cluster time)

The cadence field is required. GitLab supports the following types of CRON syntax for the cadence field:

• A daily cadence of once per hour at a specified hour, for example: 0 18 * * *
• A weekly cadence of once per week on a specified day and at a specified hour, for example: 0 13 * * 0

NOTE: Other elements of the CRON syntax may work in the cadence field if supported by the cron we are using in our implementation, however, GitLab does not officially test or support them.

NOTE: The CRON expression is evaluated in UTC using the system-time of the Kubernetes-agent pod.

By default, operational container scanning does not scan any workloads for vulnerabilities. You can set the vulnerability_report block with the namespaces field which can be used to select which namespaces are scanned. For example, if you would like to scan only the default, kube-system namespaces, you can use this configuration:

container_scanning:
  cadence: '0 0 * * *'
  vulnerability_report:
    namespaces:
      - default
      - kube-system

Enable via scan execution policies

To enable scanning of all images within your Kubernetes cluster via scan execution policies, we can use the scan execution policy editor To create a new schedule rule.

NOTE: The Kubernetes agent must be running in your cluster to scan running container images

Here is an example of a policy which enables operational container scanning within the cluster the Kubernetes agent is attached to:

- name: Enforce Container Scanning in cluster connected through my-gitlab-agent for default and kube-system namespaces
  enabled: true
  rules:
  - type: schedule
    cadence: '0 10 * * *'
    agents:
      <agent-name>:
        namespaces:
        - 'default'
        - 'kube-system'
  actions:
  - scan: container_scanning

The keys for a schedule rule are:

• cadence (required): a CRON expression for when the scans are run
• agents:<agent-name> (required): The name of the agent to use for scanning
• agents:<agent-name>:namespaces (optional): The Kubernetes namespaces to scan. If omitted, all namespaces are scanned

NOTE: Other elements of the CRON syntax may work in the cadence field if supported by the cron we are using in our implementation, however, GitLab does not officially test or support them.

NOTE: The CRON expression is evaluated in UTC using the system-time of the Kubernetes-agent pod.

You can view the complete schema within the scan execution policy documentation.

Configure scanner resource requirements

By default the scanner pod's default resource requirements are:

requests:
  cpu: 100m
  memory: 100Mi
limits:
  cpu: 500m
  memory: 500Mi

You can customize it with a resource_requirements field.

container_scanning:
  resource_requirements:
    requests:
      cpu: '0.2'
      memory: 200Mi
    limits:
      cpu: '0.7'
      memory: 700Mi

When using a fractional value for CPU, format the value as a string.

NOTE: Resource requirements can only be set up using the agent configuration. If you enabled Operational Container Scanning through scan execution policies, you would need to define the resource requirements within the agent configuration file.

View cluster vulnerabilities

To view vulnerability information in GitLab:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find the project that contains the agent configuration file.
2. Select Operate > Kubernetes clusters.
3. Select the Agent tab.
4. Select an agent to view the cluster vulnerabilities.

This information can also be found under operational vulnerabilities.

NOTE: You must have at least the Developer role.

Scanning private images

Introduced in GitLab 16.4.

To scan private images, the scanner relies on the image pull secrets (direct references and from the service account) to pull the image.

Troubleshooting

Error running Trivy scan. Container terminated reason: OOMKilled

OCS might fail with an OOM error if there are too many resources to be scanned or if the images being scanned are large. To resolve this, configure the resource requirement to increase the amount of memory available.