Runtime Inventory

Overview

Using Anchore’s runtime inventory agents provides Anchore Enterprise access to what images are being used in your deployments. This can help give insight into where vulnerabilities or policy violations are in your production workloads.

Agents

Anchore provides agents for collecting the inventory of different container runtime environments:

General Runtime Configuration

Inventory Time-To-Live

As part of reporting on your runtime environment, Anchore maintains an active record of the containers, the images they run, and other related metadata based on time they were last reported by an inventory agent.

The configuration setting below allow you to specify how long inventory should remain part of the Catalog Service’s working set. These are the default settings found in the values file.

services:
  catalog:
    runtime_inventory:
      inventory_ingest_overwrite: false
      inventory_ttl_days: 120

Below are a few examples on how you may want to use this feature.

Keep most recently reported inventory

inventory_ingest_overwrite: true
inventory_ttl_days: 7

For each cluster/namespace reported from the inventory agent, the system will delete any previously reported containers and images and replace it with the new inventory.

Note: The inventory_ttl_days is still needed to remove any cluster/namespaces that are no longer reported as well as some of the supporting metadata (ie. pods, nodes). This value should be configured to be long enough that inventory isn’t incorrectly removed in case of an outage from the reporting agent. The exact value depends on each deployment, but 7 days is a reasonable value here.

Keep inventory reported over a time period

inventory_ingest_overwrite: false
inventory_ttl_days: 14

This will delete any container and image that has not been reported by an agent in the last 14 days. This includes its supporting metadata (ie. pods, nodes).

Keep inventory indefinitely

inventory_ingest_overwrite: false
inventory_ttl_days: 0

This will keep any containers, images, and supporting metadata reported by an inventory agent indefinitely.

Deleting Inventory via API

Where it is not desirable to wait for the Image TTL to remove runtime inventory images it is possible to manually delete inventory items via the API by issuing a DELETE to /v2/inventories with the following query parameters.

inventory_type (required) - either ecs or kubernetes
context (required) - it must match a context as seen by the output of anchorectl inventory list
- Kubernetes - this is a combination of cluster name (as defined by the anchore-k8s-inventory config) and a namespace containing running containers e.g. cluster1/default.
- ECS - this is the cluster ARN e.g. arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-2:123456789012:cluster/myclustername
image_digest (optional) - set if you only want to remove a specific image

e.g. DELETE /v2/inventories?inventory_type=<string>&context=<string>&image_digest=<string>

Using curl: curl -X DELETE -u username:password "http://{servername:port}/v2/inventories?inventory_type=&context=&image_digest=