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The Trivy integration connects Kestrel to your in-cluster trivy-operator installation, enabling new security findings to trigger workflows and letting workflows list image vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, and misconfigurations, read compliance reports, and force workload rescans.

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Prerequisites

  • Kestrel Operator deployed in your cluster (see Kubernetes)
  • trivy-operator installed in the same cluster with its CRDs present (vulnerabilityreports.aquasecurity.github.io and friends)

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Setup

Trivy is auto-detected by the Kestrel Operator when the trivy-operator CRDs are present in the cluster. No manual connection or credentials are required.
1

Install trivy-operator

If trivy-operator is not already installed:
2

Verify detection

The operator probes for the trivy-operator CRDs periodically. Check the operator logs:
Once detected, the integration shows as Detected on the Integrations page and Trivy trigger and action blocks become available in the workflow builder.
The integration is enabled by default. To opt out, set operator.trivy.enabled: false in your Helm values and upgrade the operator (this sets TRIVY_DISABLED=true on the operator deployment).

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How It’s Used

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In Workflows

Trigger blocks:
  • Vulnerability Detected — fires when trivy-operator records new or changed image CVEs in a workload’s VulnerabilityReport (a vulnerable image shipped to the cluster)
  • Exposed Secret Detected — fires when a secret (AWS keys, tokens, private keys) is found baked into a container image
  • Config Audit Failed — fires when a workload or RBAC object fails security checks (privileged containers, missing runAsNonRoot, wildcard RBAC)
  • Compliance Check Failed — fires when a cluster compliance report (CIS, NSA, Pod Security Standards) has failing controls
Triggers deduplicate by report content, so trivy-operator’s periodic report recreation (its report TTL) does not re-fire unchanged findings — only new or changed findings trigger workflows. Scope triggers by cluster, namespace, severity (critical, high, medium, low), and scanned resource kind. Trigger events expose template variables such as {{signal.image}}, {{signal.workload_kind}}, {{signal.workload_name}}, {{signal.namespace}}, {{signal.severity}}, {{signal.cve_ids}}, {{signal.critical_count}}, {{signal.high_count}}, {{signal.check_ids}}, {{signal.secret_rules}}, and {{signal.compliance_report}} for downstream steps. Action blocks:
  • List Vulnerabilities — aggregate image CVEs across the cluster, filterable by namespace, workload, severity, and fix availability
  • Get Vulnerability Report — read one workload’s full vulnerability picture: per-container images, severity counts, and the CVE list
  • List Exposed Secrets — list secrets baked into container images with rule, severity, target file, and workload
  • List Misconfigurations — list failed security checks from config audit, RBAC assessment, and infra assessment reports
  • Get Compliance Report — read one cluster compliance report’s pass/fail counts and failing controls
  • Rescan Workload — force trivy-operator to rescan a workload by deleting its VulnerabilityReports (verify a patched image actually cleared its CVEs)
  • Investigate Trivy — run a read-only AI investigation across CVEs, exposed secrets, misconfigurations, and compliance via the cluster operator (the investigation can never rescan or mutate anything)
Example (vulnerability response): When a critical CVE ships to production, post the image, workload, and top CVEs to your security Slack channel and open a Jira ticket with the fix versions. Example (secret hygiene): When an exposed secret is detected in an image, alert the owning team immediately so the credential can be rotated, and file a tracking ticket. Example (patch verification): A developer asks in the request chat to rescan the nginx deployment after deploying a patched image. The workflow Rescan Workload, waits, then Get Vulnerability Report and confirms the CVEs are gone. Example (posture reporting): On a weekly schedule, List Vulnerabilities with fixable-only, summarize with AI, and post a patch-priority digest to Slack.

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Scoping

Trivy actions are scoped by cluster (populated with a dropdown of clusters where trivy-operator was detected) and, for workload-level actions, namespace and workload (accepts kind/name like deployment/nginx). Compliance reads are scoped by report name (e.g. cis, nsa), also populated from live cluster data.

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Disconnecting

To disable the Trivy integration, set the following in your Helm values and upgrade the operator: