Over the last few months, we’ve been working on making a number of updates to Fairwinds Insights to make it simpler for users to manage groupings of Kubernetes resources and policy/guardrails at scale across multiple clusters. Let’s take a look at a few of these updates and how they help you manage and analyze costs, apply policies consistently, and improve reliability.
One new addition to Insights is the ability to use a date picker filter on the Action Items page. This allows users to filter on and export findings during specific “first seen” and “last reported” time periods. For example, if you needed to report vulnerabilities that were found and fixed in the last 60 days for compliance attestation, you can now do so easily.
We also added additional out of the box support for extended Polaris checks:
Finally, we added support for wildcards on the Costs page, which allows you to filter workloads with the same prefix naming conventions. This helps to quickly analyze the cost of many like-named workloads, as you can see in the screenshot below.
In April, we introduced App Groups and Policy Mappings. App Groups are user-specified collections of Kubernetes resources that are matched on any Kubernetes metadata and can be defined across multiple clusters, while Policy Mappings are user-defined collections of specific policies. These Policy Mappings can apply to one or many App Groups. Together, App Groups and Policy Mappings offer powerful functionality because it enables you to fine-tune your Insights Action Item reporting and enforce or block a set of actions based on policy. So, for example, you could create Policy Mappings, such as having labeling conventions for all App Groups, and then have a set of security Policy Mappings that only applies to a specific App Group.
To make this functionality easier to use and manage, we’ve added support for App Groups filtering on the Action Items summary page, added App Groups to Costs Saved Views, and enabled filtering for App Groups in the Costs API. Finally, we fixed App Groups labels to match/exclusion on admission context — in other words, now you can block policy violations based off of label, making policy enforcement more dynamic. App Groups are becoming more integral across the entire Insights solution, making it easier to target specific resources, scale policy, analyze cost, and manage information overload.
Please reach out to us with any questions about Insights, App Groups, the latest updates available in the solution, or how to manage Kubernetes at scale without putting undue stress on your internal teams. We’d be happy to walk through your questions about the latest functionality in Fairwinds Insights to help you take advantage of everything it offers. Please also consider joining the Fairwinds Community on Slack or the user group.
If you don’t want to spend time managing Kubernetes, we also provide Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, a people-led service that delivers mission-critical Kubernetes infrastructure.
