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Quick reference

What is SysFlow?

The SysFlow Telemetry Pipeline is a framework for monitoring cloud workloads and for creating performance and security analytics. The goal of this project is to build all the plumbing required for system telemetry so that users can focus on writing and sharing analytics on a scalable, common open-source platform. The backbone of the telemetry pipeline is a new data format called SysFlow, which lifts raw system event information into an abstraction that describes process behaviors, and their relationships with containers, files, and network. This object-relational format is highly compact, yet it provides broad visibility into container clouds. We have also built several APIs that allow users to process SysFlow with their favorite toolkits. Learn more about SysFlow in the SysFlow specification document.

The SysFlow framework consists of the following sub-projects:

  • sf-apis provides the SysFlow schema and programatic APIs in go, python, and C++.
  • sf-collector monitors and collects system call and event information from hosts and exports them in the SysFlow format using Apache Avro object serialization.
  • sf-processor provides a performance optimized policy engine for processing, enriching, filtering SysFlow events, generating alerts, and exporting the processed data to various targets.
  • sf-exporter exports SysFlow traces to S3-compliant storage systems for archival purposes.
  • sf-deployments contains deployment packages for SysFlow, including Docker, Helm, and OpenShift.
  • sysflow is the documentation repository and issue tracker for the SysFlow framework.

About This Image

This image packages SysFlow Collector, which monitors and collects system call and event information from hosts and exports them in the SysFlow format using Apache Avro object serialization. The SysFlow Collector depends on the Falco libs to passively collect system events and turn them into SysFlow. Please check the Installation and Usage for the complete set of options.

How to use this image

Starting the collection probe

The easiest way to run the SysFlow collector is from a Docker container, with host mount for the output trace files. The following command shows how to run sf-collector with trace files exported to /mnt/data on the host.

docker run -d --privileged --name sf-collector \
		    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/host/var/run/docker.sock \
			-v /dev:/host/dev \
			-v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
			-v /boot:/host/boot:ro \
			-v /lib/modules:/host/lib/modules:ro \
            -v /usr:/host/usr:ro \
			-v /etc/:/host/etc:ro \
			-v /var/lib:/host/var/lib:ro \
			-v /mnt/data:/mnt/data \
            -e INTERVAL=60 \
            -e EXPORTER_ID=${HOSTNAME} \
            -e OUTPUT=/mnt/data/    \
            -e FILTER="container.name!=sf-collector and container.name!=sf-processor and container.name!=sf-exporter" \
            --rm sysflowtelemetry/sf-collector

where INTERVAL denotes the time in seconds before a new trace file is generated, EXPORTER_ID sets the exporter name, OUTPUT is the directory in which trace files are written, and FILTER is the filter expression used to filter collected events. Note: append container.type!=host to FILTER expression to filter host events.

Instructions for docker compose, helm, and oc deployments are available in here. Alternatively, you can install the SysFlow Collector using its binary installers available in the release pages.

Inspecting collected traces

A command line utilitiy is provided for inspecting collected traces or convert traces from SysFlow's compact binary format into human-readable JSON or CSV formats.

docker run --rm -v /mnt/data:/mnt/data sysflowtelemetry/sysprint /mnt/data/<trace>

where trace is the the name of the trace file inside /mnt/data. If empty, all files in /mnt/data are processed. By default, the traces are printed to standard output with a default set of SysFlow attributes. For a complete list of options, run:

docker run --rm -v /mnt/data:/mnt/data sysflowtelemetry/sysprint  -h

License

View license information for the software contained in this image.

As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under other licenses (such as Bash, etc from the base distribution, along with any direct or indirect dependencies of the primary software being contained).

As for any pre-built image usage, it is the image user's responsibility to ensure that any use of this image complies with any relevant licenses for all software contained within.