Generating sample events

If you'd like to check if Falco is working properly, we have the event-generator tool that can perform an activity for both our syscall and k8s audit related rules.

The tool provides a command to run either some or all sample events.

event-generator run [regexp]

Without arguments it runs all actions, otherwise only those actions matching the given regular expression.

The full command line documentation is here.

Downloads

Artifacts		Version
binaries	download link
container images	docker pull falcosecurity/event-generator:latest

Sample events

System Call Activity

The syscall collection performs a variety of suspect actions that are detected by the default Falco ruleset.

docker run -it --rm falcosecurity/event-generator run syscall --loop

The above command loops forever, incessantly generating a sample event each second.

Kubernetes Auditing Activity

The k8saudit collection generates activity that matches the k8s audit event ruleset.

event-generator run k8saudit --loop

The above command loops forever, creating resources in the current namespace and deleting them after each iteration. Use the --namespace option to choose a different namespace.

Running the Event Generator in K8s

We've also provided K8s resource object files that make it easy to run the event generator in K8s Clusters:

• role-rolebinding-serviceaccount.yaml creates a Service Account, Cluster Role, and Role that allows a service account falco-event-generator.
• event-generator.yaml creates a deployment that runs all sample events in a loop.
• run-as-job.yaml creates a job that runs all sample events once.

For example, you can run the following to create the necessary objects in the current namespace and then generate events continuously:

kubectl apply -f deployment/role-rolebinding-serviceaccount.yaml \
  -f deployment/event-generator.yaml

The above command applies to the default namespace. Use the --namespace option to deploy in a different namespace. Events will be generated in the same namespace.

You can also find more examples in the repository documentation.