Anchore Enterprise Notifications

Glossary

Event

An information packet generated by Anchore Enterprise service to indicate some activity

Endpoint

External tool capable of receiving messages such as Slack, GitHub, Jira, MS Teams, email or webhook

Endpoint Configuration

Connection information of the endpoint used for sending messages

Selector

Criteria for selecting events to be notified

Overview

Added in Anchore Enterprise v2.2

Anchore Enterprise includes Notifications service to alert external endpoints about the system’s activity. Services that make up Anchore Enterprise generate events to record significant activity such as an update in the policy evaluation result or vulnerabilities for a tag, or an error analyzing an image. This service provides a mechanism to selectively notify events of interest to supported external endpoints. The actual notification itself depends on the endpoint - formatted message to Slack, email and MS Teams endpoints, tickets in GitHub and Jira endpoints and json payload to webhook endpoint

Installation

Anchore Enterprise Notifications is included with Anchore Enterprise, and is installed by default when deploying a trial quickstart with Docker Compose or a production deployment Kubernetes.

Configuration

Enterprise Notifications Service

The service loads configuration from the notifications section of the config.yaml. Following is a snippet of the configuration

...
services:
  notifications:
    enabled: true
    require_auth: true
    endpoint_hostname: "<hostname>"
    listen: '0.0.0.0'
    port: 8228
    cycle_timers:
      notifications: 30
    # Set Anchore Enterprise UI base URL to receive UI links in notifications
    ui_url: "<enterprise-ui-url>"
    authorization_handler: external
    authorization_handler_config:
      endpoint: "<rbac-authorizer-endpoint>"

cycle_timers -> notifications controls how often the service checks for events in the system that need to be processed for notifications. Default is every 30 seconds

ui_url is used for constructing links to Enterprise UI pages in the notifications. Configure this property to the Enterprise UI’s base URL. This URL should be accessible from the endpoint receiving the notification for the links to work correctly. If the value is unset, the notification message is still sent to the endpoint but it won’t contain a clickable link to the Enterprise UI

NOTE: Any changes to the configuration requires a restart of the service for the updates to take effect

RBAC Permissions

In an Anchore Enterprise RBAC enabled deployment the table below lists the required actions and containing roles

External Tools

In order to send notifications to an external tool/endpoint the service requires connection information to that endpoint. Links below detail the required information for each endpoint

• Slack
• GitHub
• Jira
• SMTP
• Microsoft Teams

Concepts

Endpoint Status

All endpoints in the Notifications service have a switch that can be toggled enabled/disabled. Endpoint status reflects state of this switch. By default status for all endpoints is enabled out of the box. Setting endpoint status to disabled stops all notifications from going out to any configurations of that specific endpoint. This is a system-wide setting that can only be updated by the admin account. It is read-only for remaining accounts

Endpoint Configuration

Connection information such as URL, user credentials etc. for an endpoint. The service allows multiple configurations per endpoint. Endpoint configurations are scoped to the account

Selector

The services provides a mechanism to selectively choose notifications and route them to a configured endpoint. This is achieved using a ‘Selector’ - a collection of filtering criteria. Each event is processed against a Selector to determine whether it is a match or not. If the Selector matches the event a notification is sent to the configured endpoint by the service

For a quick list of useful notifications and associated Selector configurations, skip to Quick Selection

Selector encapsulates four distinct filtering criteria as of v2.2 - scope, level, type and resource type explained below. Some of them allow a limited set of values and others wildcards. Value for each criteria has to be set for the matching to compute correctly

Scope

Allowed values: account, global

Events are scoped to the account responsible for the event creation. account scope matches events associated with user’s account. global scope matches events of any and all users. global scope is limited to admin account only, non-admin account users can only specify account as the scope

Level

Allowed values: info, error, *

Events are associated with a level that indicates whether the underlying activity is informational or resulted in an error. info matches informational events such as policy evaluation or vulnerabilities update, image analysis completion etc. error matches failures such as image analysis failure. * will match all events

Type

Allowed values: strings with or without regular expressions

Event types have a structured format <category>.<subcategory>.<event>. Thus, * matches all types of events. Category is indicative of the origin of the event - system.* matches all system events, user.* matches events that are relevant to individual consumption, and omitting an asterisk will do an exact match. See the GET /event_types route definition in the external API for the list of event types.

Resource Type

Allowed values: *, image_digest, image_tag, image_reference, repository, feeds, feed, feed_group, *

In most cases events are generated during an operation involving a resource. Resource type is metadata of that resource. For instance image_tag is the resource type in a policy evaluation update event. * matches all resource types if you are uncertain what resource type to use

Quick Selection

Selector configurations for notifying a few interesting events

See it in action

Enterprise UI

To learn more about configuring Notifications service in the Enterprise UI, go to Notifications

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