• Enable operational container scanning
  • Enable via agent configuration
  • Enable via scan execution policies
• Configure scanner resource requirements
• View cluster vulnerabilities
• Scanning private images

Operational Container Scanning

Enable operational container scanning

You can use operational container scanning to scan container images in your cluster for security vulnerabilities. You can enable the scanner to run on a cadence as configured via the agent config, or setup scan execution policies within a project that houses the agent.

Enable via agent configuration

To enable scanning of all images within your Kubernetes cluster via the agent configuration, add a container_scanning configuration block to your agent configuration with a cadence field containing a CRON expression for when the scans are run.

container_scanning:
  cadence: '0 0 * * *' # Daily at 00:00 (Kubernetes cluster time)

The cadence field is required. GitLab supports the following types of CRON syntax for the cadence field:

• A daily cadence of once per hour at a specified hour, for example: 0 18 * * *
• A weekly cadence of once per week on a specified day and at a specified hour, for example: 0 13 * * 0

By default, operational container scanning attempts to scan the workloads in all namespaces for vulnerabilities. You can set the vulnerability_report block with the namespaces field which can be used to restrict which namespaces are scanned. For example, if you would like to scan only the default, kube-system namespaces, you can use this configuration:

container_scanning:
  cadence: '0 0 * * *'
  vulnerability_report:
    namespaces:
      - default
      - kube-system

Enable via scan execution policies

To enable scanning of all images within your Kubernetes cluster via scan execution policies, we can use the scan execution policy editor To create a new schedule rule.

Here is an example of a policy which enables operational container scanning within the cluster the Kubernetes agent is attached to:

- name: Enforce Container Scanning in cluster connected through my-gitlab-agent for default and kube-system namespaces
  enabled: true
  rules:
  - type: schedule
    cadence: '0 10 * * *'
    agents:
      <agent-name>:
        namespaces:
        - 'default'
        - 'kube-system'
  actions:
  - scan: container_scanning

The keys for a schedule rule are:

• cadence (required): a CRON expression for when the scans are run
• agents:<agent-name> (required): The name of the agent to use for scanning
• agents:<agent-name>:namespaces (optional): The Kubernetes namespaces to scan. If omitted, all namespaces are scanned

You can view the complete schema within the scan execution policy documentation.

Configure scanner resource requirements

By default the scanner pod’s default resource requirements are:

requests:
  cpu: 100m
  memory: 100Mi
limits:
  cpu: 500m
  memory: 500Mi

You can customize it with a resource_requirements field.

container_scanning:
  resource_requirements:
    requests:
      cpu: 200m
      memory: 200Mi
    limits:
      cpu: 700m
      memory: 700Mi

View cluster vulnerabilities

To view vulnerability information in GitLab:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find the project that contains the agent configuration file.
2. Select Operate > Kubernetes clusters.
3. Select the Agent tab.
4. Select an agent to view the cluster vulnerabilities.

This information can also be found under operational vulnerabilities.

Scanning private images

To scan private images, the scanner relies on the image pull secrets (direct references and from the service account) to pull the image.