Threat Monitoring (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 12.9.

The Threat Monitoring page provides metrics and policy management for the GitLab application runtime security features. You can access these by navigating to your project's Security & Compliance > Threat Monitoring page.

GitLab supports statistics for the following security features:

• Web Application Firewall
• Container Network Policies

Web Application Firewall

The Web Application Firewall section provides metrics for the NGINX Ingress controller and ModSecurity firewall. This section has the following prerequisites:

• Project has to have at least one environment.
• Web Application Firewall has to be enabled.
• Elastic Stack has to be installed.

If you are using custom Helm values for the Elastic Stack you have to configure Filebeat similarly to the vendored values.

The Web Application Firewall section displays the following information about your Ingress traffic:

• The total amount of requests to your application
• The proportion of traffic that is considered anomalous according to the configured rules
• The request breakdown graph for the selected time interval

If a significant percentage of traffic is anomalous, you should investigate it for potential threats by examining the Web Application Firewall logs.

Container Network Policy

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 12.9.

The Container Network Policy section provides packet flow metrics for your application's Kubernetes namespace. This section has the following prerequisites:

• Your project contains at least one environment
• You've installed Cilium
• You've configured the Prometheus service

If you're using custom Helm values for Cilium, you must enable Hubble with flow metrics for each namespace by adding the following lines to your Cilium values:

global:
  hubble:
    enabled: true
    metrics:
      enabled:
        - 'flow:sourceContext=namespace;destinationContext=namespace'

The Container Network Policy section displays the following information about your packet flow:

• The total amount of the inbound and outbound packets
• The proportion of packets dropped according to the configured policies
• The per-second average rate of the forwarded and dropped packets accumulated over time window for the requested time interval

If a significant percentage of packets is dropped, you should investigate it for potential threats by examining the Cilium logs.

Container Network Policy management

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 13.1.

The Threat Monitoring page's Policy tab displays deployed network policies for all available environments. You can check a network policy's yaml manifest, toggle the policy's enforcement status, and create and edit deployed policies. This section has the following prerequisites:

• Your project contains at least one environment
• You've installed Cilium

Network policies are fetched directly from the selected environment's deployment platform. Changes performed outside of this tab are reflected upon refresh. Enforcement status changes are deployed directly to a deployment namespace of the selected environment.

By default, the network policy list contains predefined policies in a disabled state. Once enabled, a predefined policy deploys to the selected environment's deployment platform and you can manage it like the regular policies.

Note that if you're using Auto DevOps and change a policy in this section, your auto-deploy-values.yaml file doesn't update. Auto DevOps users must make changes by following the Container Network Policy documentation.

Changing enforcement status

To change a network policy's enforcement status:

• Click the network policy you want to update.
• Click the Enforcement status toggle to update the selected policy.
• Click the Apply changes button to deploy network policy changes.

Disabled network policies have the network-policy.gitlab.com/disabled_by: gitlab selector inside the podSelector block. This narrows the scope of such a policy and as a result it doesn't affect any pods. The policy itself is still deployed to the corresponding deployment namespace.

Container Network Policy editor

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 13.4.

You can use the policy editor to create, edit, and delete policies.

• To create a new policy, click the New policy button located in the Policy tab's header.
• To edit an existing policy, click Edit policy in the selected policy drawer.

The policy editor only supports the CiliumNetworkPolicy specification. Regular Kubernetes NetworkPolicy resources aren't supported.

The policy editor has two modes:

• The visual Rule mode allows you to construct and preview policy rules using rule blocks and related controls.
• YAML mode allows you to enter a policy definition in .yaml format and is aimed at expert users and cases that the Rule mode doesn't support.

You can use both modes interchangeably and switch between them at any time. If a YAML resource is incorrect, Rule mode is automatically disabled. You must use YAML mode to fix your policy before Rule mode is available again.

Rule mode supports the following rule types:

• Labels.
• Entities.
• IP/CIDR. Only the toCIDR block without except is supported.
• DNS.
• Level 4 can be added to all other rules.

Once your policy is complete, save it by pressing the Save policy button at the bottom of the editor. Existing policies can also be removed from the editor interface by clicking the Delete policy button at the bottom of the editor.

Configuring Network Policy Alerts

Introduced and enabled by default in GitLab Ultimate 13.9.

You can use policy alerts to track your policy's impact. Alerts are only available if you've installed and configured a Kubernetes Agent for this project.

There are two ways to create policy alerts:

• In the policy editor UI, by clicking Add alert.

• In the policy editor's YAML mode, through the metadata.annotations property:

  metadata:
    annotations:
      app.gitlab.com/alert: 'true'

Once added, the UI updates and displays a warning about the dangers of too many alerts.

Enable or disable Policy Alerts (ULTIMATE)

Policy Alerts is under development but ready for production use. It is deployed behind a feature flag that is enabled by default. GitLab administrators with access to the GitLab Rails console can opt to disable it.

To enable it:

Feature.enable(:threat_monitoring_alerts)

To disable it:

Feature.disable(:threat_monitoring_alerts)

Container Network Policy Alert list

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 13.9.

The policy alert list displays your policy's alert activity. You can sort the list by these columns:

• Date and time
• Events
• Status

You can filter the list with the Policy Name filter and the Status filter at the top. Use the selector menu in the Status column to set the status for each alert:

• Unreviewed
• In review
• Resolved
• Dismissed

By default, the list doesn't display resolved or dismissed alerts.

Clicking an alert's row opens the alert drawer, which shows more information about the alert. A user can also create an incident from the alert and update the alert status in the alert drawer.

Clicking an alert's name takes the user to the alert details page.

For information on work in progress for the alerts dashboard, see this epic.