Execution Monitoring

Execution traces with Tetragon

At the core of Tetragon is the tracking of all executions in a kubernetes cluster, virtual machines, and baremetal systems. This creates the foundation that allows Tetragon to attribute all system behavior back to a specific binary and its associated metadata (container, Pod, Node, and cluster).

Observe Tetragon Execution Events

Tetragon exposes the execution trace over JSON logs and GRPC stream. The user can then observe all executions in the system.

The following command can be used to observe exec events.

kubectl exec -ti -n kube-system ds/tetragon -c tetragon -- tetra getevents -o compact --pods xwing
docker exec tetragon-container tetra getevents -o compact

This will print a compact form of the exec logs. For an example we do the following with the demo application.

kubectl exec -ti xwing -- bash -c 'curl https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon'
curl https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon

The CLI will print a compact form of the event to the terminal similar to the following output.

🚀 process default/xwing /bin/bash -c "curl https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon"
🚀 process default/xwing /usr/bin/curl https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon
💥 exit    default/xwing /usr/bin/curl https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon 60

The compact exec event contains the event type, the pod name, the binary and the args. The exit event will include the return code, in the case of curl 60 above.

For the complete exec event in JSON format remove the compact option.

kubectl exec -ti -n kube-system ds/tetragon -c tetragon -- tetra getevents --pods xwing
docker exec tetragon-container tetra getevents

This will include a lot more details related the binary and event. A full example of the above curl is hown here, In a Kubernetes environment this will include the Kubernetes metadata include the Pod, Container, Namespaces, and Labels among other useful metadata.

Process execution event

{
  "process_exec": {
    "process": {
      "exec_id": "Z2tlLWpvaG4tNjMyLWRlZmF1bHQtcG9vbC03MDQxY2FjMC05czk1OjEzNTQ4Njc0MzIxMzczOjUyNjk5",
      "pid": 52699,
      "uid": 0,
      "cwd": "/",
      "binary": "/usr/bin/curl",
      "arguments": "https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon",
      "flags": "execve rootcwd",
      "start_time": "2023-10-06T22:03:57.700327580Z",
      "auid": 4294967295,
      "pod": {
        "namespace": "default",
        "name": "xwing",
        "container": {
          "id": "containerd://551e161c47d8ff0eb665438a7bcd5b4e3ef5a297282b40a92b7c77d6bd168eb3",
          "name": "spaceship",
          "image": {
            "id": "docker.io/tgraf/netperf@sha256:8e86f744bfea165fd4ce68caa05abc96500f40130b857773186401926af7e9e6",
            "name": "docker.io/tgraf/netperf:latest"
          },
          "start_time": "2023-10-06T21:52:41Z",
          "pid": 49
        },
        "pod_labels": {
          "app.kubernetes.io/name": "xwing",
          "class": "xwing",
          "org": "alliance"
        },
        "workload": "xwing"
      },
      "docker": "551e161c47d8ff0eb665438a7bcd5b4",
      "parent_exec_id": "Z2tlLWpvaG4tNjMyLWRlZmF1bHQtcG9vbC03MDQxY2FjMC05czk1OjEzNTQ4NjcwODgzMjk5OjUyNjk5",
      "tid": 52699
    },
    "parent": {
      "exec_id": "Z2tlLWpvaG4tNjMyLWRlZmF1bHQtcG9vbC03MDQxY2FjMC05czk1OjEzNTQ4NjcwODgzMjk5OjUyNjk5",
      "pid": 52699,
      "uid": 0,
      "cwd": "/",
      "binary": "/bin/bash",
      "arguments": "-c \"curl https://ebpf.io/applications/#tetragon\"",
      "flags": "execve rootcwd clone",
      "start_time": "2023-10-06T22:03:57.696889812Z",
      "auid": 4294967295,
      "pod": {
        "namespace": "default",
        "name": "xwing",
        "container": {
          "id": "containerd://551e161c47d8ff0eb665438a7bcd5b4e3ef5a297282b40a92b7c77d6bd168eb3",
          "name": "spaceship",
          "image": {
            "id": "docker.io/tgraf/netperf@sha256:8e86f744bfea165fd4ce68caa05abc96500f40130b857773186401926af7e9e6",
            "name": "docker.io/tgraf/netperf:latest"
          },
          "start_time": "2023-10-06T21:52:41Z",
          "pid": 49
        },
        "pod_labels": {
          "app.kubernetes.io/name": "xwing",
          "class": "xwing",
          "org": "alliance"
        },
        "workload": "xwing"
      },
      "docker": "551e161c47d8ff0eb665438a7bcd5b4",
      "parent_exec_id": "Z2tlLWpvaG4tNjMyLWRlZmF1bHQtcG9vbC03MDQxY2FjMC05czk1OjEzNTQ4NjQ1MjQ1ODM5OjUyNjg5",
      "tid": 52699
    }
  },
  "node_name": "gke-john-632-default-pool-7041cac0-9s95",
  "time": "2023-10-06T22:03:57.700326678Z"
}

What’s next

Execution events are the most basic event Tetragon can produce. To see how to use tracing policies to enable file monitoring see the File Access Monitoring quickstart. To see a network policy check the Networking Monitoring quickstart.

Last modified December 1, 2023: docs: fix syntax highlighting (e89f8ab7)