k8s-metacollector

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for k8s-metacollector

Fetches the metadata from kubernetes API server and dispatches them to Falco instances

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k8s-metacollector:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

k8s-metacollector is a Kubernetes metadata collector for the Falco runtime-security project. It watches the Kubernetes API server for core resources (pods, services, deployments, replicasets, namespaces, and endpointslices), filters the metadata per node, and dispatches it to subscribed Falco instances over gRPC. It is built with Go and licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Usage

The /meta-collector binary is the entrypoint for the container image. Run with --help to view the list of supported commands and options:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k8s-metacollector:latest --help

The image runs as the nonroot user (UID 65532) by default.

Deploying with Helm

The Falco project publishes an official Helm chart. To deploy it with this image:

helm repo add falcosecurity https://falcosecurity.github.io/charts
helm install k8s-metacollector falcosecurity/k8s-metacollector \
  --namespace metacollector --create-namespace \
  --set image.registry=cgr.dev \
  --set image.repository=ORGANIZATION/k8s-metacollector \
  --set image.tag=latest

Exposed ports

The collector listens on the following ports by default:

• 8080 — Prometheus metrics
• 8081 — health and readiness probes (/healthz, /readyz)
• 45000 — gRPC broker used by Falco instances

For more information, refer to the upstream documentation:

• k8s-metacollector GitHub
• Falco k8s-metacollector Helm chart

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.