Introducing Full Workload Inventory Visibility in ARMO: See What’s Running, What It’s Doing, and How It’s Protected

At ARMO, our mission is to make Kubernetes security more accessible, actionable, and effective. That’s why we’re excited to launch a major upgrade to our platform: Full Workload Inventory Visibility.

This powerful new capability helps security and platform teams answer the question at the core of Kubernetes security:

“What’s actually running in my cluster, and how secure is it?”

At a Glance: What Full Workload Inventory Visibility Delivers

🔍 Deep, real-time visibility into how each workload behaves and what it’s connected to

🛡️ Complete security posture from misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to live runtime incidents

🌐 Visual security graph that maps exposure paths, service connections, and attached resources

📦 Deployment-level insights to quickly understand workload specs, context, and triage paths

Real-World Scenarios: Where This Feature Adds Value

Investigating a Security Incident

A container triggered a threat detection alert. Now what? With Full Inventory Visibility, security teams can quickly trace the workload’s behavior, network access, and runtime actions, leading to faster root cause analysis and more confident remediation.

DevSecOps Collaboration

The DevOps team is pushing new workloads every day. Security needs to validate that they’re protected and don’t introduce new risks. This feature bridges the gap with a shared view that includes both deployment data and runtime security posture.

Risk Prioritization

You have 800 workloads with vulnerabilities. Which ones are exposed to the internet? Which ones are privileged or communicating with sensitive services? Full visibility lets you prioritize based on real context, not just CVE counts.

The Problem: Too Many Blind Spots in Workload Security

Modern Kubernetes environments run hundreds, even thousands of workloads across clusters. Each one can behave differently, connect to different resources, and carry different security risks. But most tools give you only fragmented or surface-level insights, forcing teams to stitch together context manually.

You may know a workload is vulnerable, but do you know what files it’s accessing, what APIs it’s calling, or what it’s communicating with across the network?

Until now, getting this level of insight has been painful or impossible.

The Solution: ARMO’s Full Workload Inventory Visibility

With this new capability, ARMO Platform gives you a complete, real-time picture of every workload in your Kubernetes environment, not just from a configuration or risk standpoint, but also from a behavioral and runtime perspective.

Here’s what it includes:

Real-Time Security Graph

Visualize how workloads are connected – because security isn’t just about what a workload is, but what it’s connected to:

• Which services talk to each other
  Unexpected or overly permissive service-to-service communication is a common path for lateral movement in attacks. Knowing which workloads are talking to each other helps you detect anomalous connections, enforce least-privilege communication, and limit blast radius in case of compromise.
  
• Network exposure paths (e.g., Ingress, LoadBalancer)
  Exposed workloads are high-value targets. Whether it’s a public LoadBalancer, a NodePort, or an Ingress route, knowing which workloads are reachable from the internet (or other external entities) is critical for prioritizing patching, hardening, and monitoring efforts.
  
• Attached resources like volumes, secrets, Roles
  A compromised workload with access to sensitive resources, like persistent volumes, service account tokens, or privileged IAM roles, can escalate into a broader breach. Mapping these resource attachments helps identify hidden risk factors and enforces proper isolation and access control.

Application profile – Understand how your workloads operate, and why it matters for security:

• Processes running inside the container
  Malicious or unexpected processes are a clear sign something’s wrong. Seeing which processes are running helps you detect suspicious activity – like cryptominers, reverse shells, or rogue binaries—before they cause damage.
  
• Files accessed or modified
  Security incidents often involve tampering with sensitive files—like config files, secrets, or logs. Monitoring file access lets you spot abnormal behavior, such as attempts to read token files or modify binaries inside the container.
  
• API calls made
  Workloads calling unexpected internal or external APIs could signal data exfiltration, privilege escalation, or lateral movement. Tracking these calls gives you deep visibility into how an application is behaving across your environment.
  
• Network traffic
  Unexpected connections to external or internal services can indicate command-and-control communication, data leakage, or lateral movement. By monitoring network flows, you can detect abnormal communication patterns and enforce least-privilege access.
  
• Syscalls (System Calls)
  Syscalls are how a process interacts with the kernel—and attackers often exploit this layer. Tracking system calls helps detect behaviors like privilege escalation, process injection, or attempts to escape the container. It’s a critical layer of visibility for runtime threat detection.
  
• Linux capabilities in use
  Containers should run with minimal privileges. If a workload is using powerful Linux capabilities (like CAP_SYS_ADMIN or CAP_NET_RAW), it may be over-privileged, making it easier for attackers to exploit the container or host system.

By capturing all this behavior, ARMO helps you move from reactive to proactive security: not just responding to alerts, but understanding the full context of your workloads so you can spot threats earlier, harden configurations, and reduce risk before an attacker exploits it.

Security Posture Overview

See exactly how each workload is secured – and why that matters for keeping your environment safe:

• Misconfigurations
  A single misconfiguration, like allowing privileged containers or disabling securityContext, can expose an entire cluster. Identifying and fixing misconfigurations reduces the attack surface and helps enforce Kubernetes security best practices.
  
• Vulnerabilities
  Outdated packages, libraries, or base images may contain known CVEs that attackers can exploit. Understanding which workloads are vulnerable allows you to prioritize patching based on actual risk, not guesswork.
  
• Runtime incidents
  Some risks only become visible at runtime, like containers behaving unexpectedly, accessing sensitive resources, or spawning suspicious processes. Monitoring runtime behavior gives you insight into threats that static scanning can’t detect.
  
• Workload Risk Factors
  Not all workloads are equally risky. Those exposed to the internet, running with elevated privileges, or lacking isolation controls pose a bigger threat. Identifying and scoring risk factors helps teams focus on the most critical workloads first.
  
• Protection layers like network policies and seccomp profiles
  These are your in-cluster security controls. Network policies limit which services can talk to each other, and seccomp profiles restrict dangerous system calls. Knowing which workloads have these protections in place, and which don’t, is key to enforcing zero trust principles and stopping lateral movement during attacks.

By combining configuration checks, runtime insights, and policy enforcement visibility,ARMO Platform gives you a real-world view of how secure each workload really is, not just in theory, but in practice.

Deployment Context

Quickly review workload specs, because understanding how a workload is configured is essential to evaluating its security posture:

• Pod configuration, labels, and namespaces
  Pod specs determine how containers run, including security settings like privilege escalation, read-only filesystems, and service accounts. Labels and namespaces help define trust boundaries and access policies. Security teams need this context to understand whether workloads are appropriately isolated, restricted, and governed.
  
• Container images
  The base image defines what software is in the container, and what vulnerabilities it might carry. If you’re running outdated or untrusted images, you’re increasing your exposure. Tracking which images are used helps enforce image hygiene, version control, and allowlists.
  
• Ports and exposed services
  Open ports can unintentionally expose internal services to external traffic. Knowing which ports are exposed allows teams to catch misconfigurations and enforce network controls, before they become an entry point for attackers.

By combining this deployment metadata with runtime and risk insights, ARMO Platform helps you connect how a workload is built and deployed with how it behaves and how it’s secured. That’s essential for enforcing policy, detecting drift, and responding quickly when something looks suspicious.

All of this is available in a single unified view, no more jumping between tools or dashboards.

Ready to Eliminate Blind Spots in Your Kubernetes Environment?

Clarity. Context. Confidence.
That’s what Full Workload Inventory Visibility delivers.

New to ARMO? Start a free trial or request a demo, and experience security through real-time insights.

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