Reporting

View and audit Kyverno policy results with reports.

Policy reports are Kubernetes Custom Resources, generated and managed automatically by Kyverno, which contain the results of applying matching Kubernetes resources to Kyverno ClusterPolicy or Policy resources. They are created for validate and verifyImages rules when a resource is matched by one or more rules according to the policy definition. If resources violate multiple rules, there will be multiple entries. When resources are deleted, their entry will be removed from the report. Reports, therefore, always represent the current state of the cluster and do not record historical information.

For example, if a validate policy in Audit mode exists containing a single rule which requires that all resources set the label team and a user creates a Pod which does not set the team label, Kyverno will allow the Pod’s creation but record it as a fail result in a policy report due to the Pod being in violation of the policy and rule. Policies configured with spec.validationFailureAction: Enforce immediately block violating resources and results will only be reported for pass evaluations. Policy reports are an ideal way to observe the impact a Kyverno policy may have in a cluster without causing disruption. The insights gained from these policy reports may be used to provide valuable feedback to both users/developers so they may take appropriate action to bring offending resources into alignment, and to policy authors or cluster operators to help them refine policies prior to changing them to Enforce mode. Because reports are decoupled from policies, standard Kubernetes RBAC can then be applied to separate those who can see and manipulate policies from those who can view reports.

Policy reports are created based on two different triggers: an admission event (a CREATE, UPDATE, or DELETE action performed against a resource) or the result of a background scan discovering existing resources. Policy reports, like Kyverno policies, have both Namespaced and cluster-scoped variants; a PolicyReport is a Namespaced resource while a ClusterPolicyReport is a cluster-scoped resource. Reports are stored in the cluster on a per resource basis. Every namespaced resource will (eventually) have an associated PolicyReport and every clustered resource will (eventually) have an associated ClusterPolicyReport.

Kyverno uses a standard and open format published by the Kubernetes Policy working group which proposes a common policy report format across Kubernetes tools. Below is an example of a PolicyReport generated for a Pod which shows passing and failed rules.

1apiVersion: wgpolicyk8s.io/v1alpha2 2kind: PolicyReport 3metadata: 4 creationTimestamp: "2023-12-06T13:19:03Z" 5 generation: 2 6 labels: 7 app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: kyverno 8 name: 487df031-11d8-4ab4-b089-dfc0db1e533e 9 namespace: kube-system 10 ownerReferences: 11 - apiVersion: v1 12 kind: Pod 13 name: kube-apiserver-kind-control-plane 14 uid: 487df031-11d8-4ab4-b089-dfc0db1e533e 15 resourceVersion: "720507" 16 uid: 0ec04a57-4c3d-492d-9278-951cd1929fe3 17results: 18- category: Pod Security Standards (Baseline) 19 message: validation rule 'adding-capabilities' passed. 20 policy: disallow-capabilities 21 result: pass 22 rule: adding-capabilities 23 scored: true 24 severity: medium 25 source: kyverno 26 timestamp: 27 nanos: 0 28 seconds: 1701868762 29- category: Pod Security Standards (Baseline) 30 message: 'validation error: Sharing the host namespaces is disallowed. The fields 31 spec.hostNetwork, spec.hostIPC, and spec.hostPID must be unset or set to `false`. 32 rule host-namespaces failed at path /spec/hostNetwork/' 33 policy: disallow-host-namespaces 34 result: fail 35 rule: host-namespaces 36 scored: true 37 severity: medium 38 source: kyverno 39 timestamp: 40 nanos: 0 41 seconds: 1701868762 42# ... 43scope: 44 apiVersion: v1 45 kind: Pod 46 name: kube-apiserver-kind-control-plane 47 namespace: kube-system 48 uid: 487df031-11d8-4ab4-b089-dfc0db1e533e 49summary: 50 error: 0 51 fail: 2 52 pass: 10 53 skip: 0 54 warn: 0
yaml

The report’s contents can be found under the results[] object in which it displays a number of fields including the resource that was matched against the rule in the parent policy.

Policy reports have a few configuration options available. For details, see the container flags section.

Report result logic

Entries in a policy report contain a result field which can be either pass, skip, warn, error, or fail.

ResultDescription
passThe resource was applicable to a rule and the pattern passed evaluation.
skipPreconditions were not satisfied (if applicable) in a rule, or an applicable PolicyException exists and so further processing was not performed.
failThe resource failed the pattern evaluation.
warnThe annotation policies.kyverno.io/scored has been set to "false" in the policy converting otherwise fail results to warn.
errorVariable substitution failed outside of preconditions and elsewhere in the rule (ex., in the pattern).

Viewing policy report summaries

You can view a summary of the Namespaced policy reports using the following command:

1kubectl get policyreport -A
bash

For example, below are the policy reports found in the kube-system namespace of a small test cluster created with kind.

1$ kubectl get polr -n kube-system -o wide 2NAME KIND NAME PASS FAIL WARN ERROR SKIP AGE 3049a4ec1-32a5-4417-9184-1a59cfaa1ca6 DaemonSet kindnet 9 3 0 0 0 16m 4049d2cca-c30f-4f26-a70a-dfcc2cc5f433 DaemonSet kube-proxy 9 3 0 0 0 16m 51d491ec4-ca84-4b3a-960a-a2aefa3219ba Pod kube-controller-manager-kind-control-plane 10 2 0 0 0 16m 634fa05b8-40cc-4bd3-836e-077abf4c126e Pod kindnet-qtq54 9 3 0 0 0 16m 73997d5d0-363a-4820-8768-4be3788b3968 Pod kube-proxy-tcgcz 9 3 0 0 0 16m 84434c0ac-e27f-41eb-b4c2-b1a7aca8056a ReplicaSet coredns-5dd5756b68 12 0 0 0 0 16m 9487df031-11d8-4ab4-b089-dfc0db1e533e Pod kube-apiserver-kind-control-plane 10 2 0 0 0 16m 10553c0601-b995-4ed8-a36b-11e7cb38893b Pod kube-proxy-jdsck 9 3 0 0 0 16m 1189044d72-8a1e-4af0-877b-9be727dc3ec4 Pod kindnet-7rrns 9 3 0 0 0 16m 129eb8c5c0-fe5c-4c7d-96c3-3ff65c361f4f Pod etcd-kind-control-plane 10 2 0 0 0 16m 13b7968d37-4337-4756-bfe8-3c111f7a7356 Pod kube-proxy-ncvxk 9 3 0 0 0 16m 14cc894ef1-6a45-44e0-99f6-3765a59088e7 Pod kube-scheduler-kind-control-plane 10 2 0 0 0 16m 15cf538bcc-4752-45d4-9712-480c425dc8d3 Pod kindnet-c8fv6 9 3 0 0 0 16m 16d9ea5169-17a7-458d-a971-09028a73cddd Pod coredns-5dd5756b68-z5whj 12 0 0 0 0 16m 17e23946aa-17c3-4b96-b72b-eb7fd72eba62 Deployment coredns 12 0 0 0 0 16m 18e666a741-c9cf-499c-a9c7-b8e0c600239a Pod kindnet-2rkgr 9 3 0 0 0 16m 19e6f5aa6a-74e0-4c30-bb2b-1a6ee046e5ad Pod coredns-5dd5756b68-tnv25 12 0 0 0 0 16m 20fd2aa944-3fc7-42b0-a6c0-1304e0aa473f Pod kube-proxy-p4x82 9 3 0 0 0 16m
bash

Similarly, you can view the cluster-wide report using:

1kubectl get clusterpolicyreport
bash

Viewing policy violations

Since the report provides information on all rule and resource execution, returning only select entries requires a filter expression.

Policy reports can be inspected using either kubectl describe or kubectl get. For example, here is a command, requiring yq, to view only failures for the (Namespaced) report 1d491ec4-ca84-4b3a-960a-a2aefa3219ba:

1kubectl get polr 1d491ec4-ca84-4b3a-960a-a2aefa3219ba -o jsonpath='{.results[?(@.result=="fail")]}' | yq -p json -
bash
1category: Pod Security Standards (Baseline) 2message: 'validation error: Privileged mode is disallowed. The fields spec.containers[*].securityContext.privileged and spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.privileged must be unset or set to `false`. . rule privileged-containers failed at path /spec/containers/0/securityContext/privileged/' 3policy: disallow-privileged-containers 4result: fail 5rule: privileged-containers 6scored: true 7severity: medium 8source: kyverno 9timestamp: 10 nanos: 0 11 seconds: 1.666094801e+09 12--- 13category: Pod Security Standards (Baseline) 14message: 'validation error: Privileged mode is disallowed. The fields spec.containers[*].securityContext.privileged and spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.privileged must be unset or set to `false`. . rule privileged-containers failed at path /spec/containers/0/securityContext/privileged/' 15policy: disallow-privileged-containers 16result: fail 17rule: privileged-containers 18scored: true 19severity: medium 20source: kyverno 21timestamp: 22 nanos: 0 23 seconds: 1.666095335e+09
yaml

Report internals

The PolicyReport and ClusterPolicyReport are the final resources composed of matching resources as determined by Kyverno Policy and ClusterPolicy objects, however these reports are built of four intermediary resources. For matching resources which were caught during admission mode, AdmissionReport and ClusterAdmissionReport resources are created. For results of background processing, BackgroundScanReport and ClusterBackgroundScanReport resources are created. An example of a ClusterAdmissionReport is shown below.

1apiVersion: kyverno.io/v1alpha2 2kind: ClusterAdmissionReport 3metadata: 4 creationTimestamp: "2022-10-18T13:15:09Z" 5 generation: 1 6 labels: 7 app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: kyverno 8 audit.kyverno.io/resource.hash: a7ec5160f220c5b83c26b5c8f7dc35b6 9 audit.kyverno.io/resource.uid: 61946422-14ba-4aa2-94b4-229d38446381 10 cpol.kyverno.io/require-ns-labels: "4773" 11 name: c0cc7337-9bcd-4d53-abb2-93f7f5555216 12 resourceVersion: "4986" 13 uid: 10babc6c-9e6e-4386-abed-c13f50091523 14spec: 15 owner: 16 apiVersion: v1 17 kind: Namespace 18 name: testing 19 uid: 61946422-14ba-4aa2-94b4-229d38446381 20 results: 21 - message: 'validation error: The label `thisshouldntexist` is required. rule check-for-labels-on-namespace 22 failed at path /metadata/labels/thisshouldntexist/' 23 policy: require-ns-labels 24 result: fail 25 rule: check-for-labels-on-namespace 26 scored: true 27 source: kyverno 28 timestamp: 29 nanos: 0 30 seconds: 1666098909 31 summary: 32 error: 0 33 fail: 1 34 pass: 0 35 skip: 0 36 warn: 0
yaml

These intermediary resources have the same basic contents as a policy report and are used internally by Kyverno to build the final policy report. Kyverno will merge these results automatically into the appropriate policy report and there is no manual interaction typically required.

For more details on the internal reporting processes, see the developer docs here.


Background Scans

Periodically reapply policies to existing resources for reporting.

Example Scenarios

Follow along scenarios for creating and viewing your first policy reports.