Getting Started

• 1: Easy Install
• 2: Advanced Install

1 - Easy Install

You can install m9sweeper using our helm chart. This is a one-line cli command that installs m9sweeper. Change the default username/password to your own username/password and the API Key to something random/unpredictable.

helm repo add m9sweeper https://m9sweeper.github.io/m9sweeper && \
helm repo update && \
helm upgrade m9sweeper m9sweeper/m9sweeper --install --wait --create-namespace --namespace m9sweeper-system \
  --set-string dash.init.superAdminEmail="super.admin@m9sweeper.io" \
  --set-string dash.init.superAdminPassword="password" \
  --set-string global.jwtSecret="changeme" \
  --set-string global.apiKey="YOUR-API-KEY"

Many more options are available. For serious enterprise deployments, we recommend creating a helm values.yaml file and versioning this in a code repository to make upgrades easier.

For more information, please see the advanced installation guide.

2 - Advanced Install

Install

Installation

We recommend putting your configuration in a values.yaml file and then deploying our app using helm. This example uses “helm upgrade –install”, which is an idempotent way of installing and/or upgrading the app. This is repeatable and the same command can be run regardless of whether you intend to upgrade or install the app.

helm repo add m9sweeper https://m9sweeper.github.io/m9sweeper && \
helm repo update && \
helm upgrade m9sweeper m9sweeper/m9sweeper --install --wait --create-namespace --namespace m9sweeper-system \
  --values values.yaml --version latest

When implementing for our customers we automate this in a CICD pipeline. Upgrades can be done simply by changing which chart version you are deploying. By default, it installs the latest version, but you can add –version to install a specific version of m9sweeper.

At a minimum, you MUST specify these 4 values:

--set-string dash.init.superAdminEmail="super.admin@m9sweeper.io"
--set-string dash.init.superAdminPassword="password"
--set-string global.jwtSecret="changeme" \
--set-string global.apiKey="YOUR-API-KEY"

Validating Webhook

If you wish to have m9sweeper prevent applications from booting up that are not compliant with your specified policies, you will need the validating webhook. This installs automatically and should work without any configuration in most installations.

However, in some installations of Kubernetes such as Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as well as some others depending upon configuration, the kubernetes' API is not allowed to reach out to a remote cluster or a remote ingress when validating whether a pod is allowed to boot or not. Therefore, we have to set it up to connect to a pod in the local cluster as well as setup the appropriate Certificate Authority, Public, and Private Keys to enable SSL. This will allow the validating webhook to be hit by the Kubernetes API when validating whether a pod is compliant and allowed to boot up. To assist in this process we have developed a script that will install a nginx reverse proxy that will allow your kubernetes API to reach the validating webhook. For information on utilizing this script, please see the scripts documentation on our GitHub page here.

Falco bulkhead Deployment

Depending on your environment, Falco can send an immense amount of alerts to M9sweeper. This could overload the application and cause it to crash. To avoid this, there is an option to deploy multiple instances of M9sweeper that only take api requests sent to /api/falco.

falco:
  bulkhead: true
  replicas: 1

When set to true, this will create a seperate deployment appended with “-falco”, a service, and when applicable, a service monitor. This also edits ingress, routing all API calls from Falco, into the bulkhead deployment.

Configuration Options

If postgresql is enabled, then it will deploy postgres db. Set to false to use an external postgres DB

postgres:
  enabled: true

If rabbitmq is enabled, then it will deploy rabbitmq. Set to false to use an external rabbitmq.

rabbitmq:
  enabled: true

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the chart and the default values.