Choosing Insights CI or Auto-Scan

Fairwinds Insights offers integrations into popular Git and CI/CD tools to enable infrastructure-as-code scanning in your development process. Scans can be initiated on every pull request and commit on any repository, enabling organizations to "shift left" and help catch image vulnerabilities and Kubernetes misconfigurations before they make it into production.

There are two options for this:

• Auto-Scan: The easiest option is using our Auto-Scan feature. Auto-Scan uses a GitHub integration to enable infrastructure-as-code scanning across multiple repositories without having to configure individual CI pipelines. This option will use the Fairwinds Insights SaaS infrastructure to run the checks and is recommended for organizations using Github. Currently, Auto-Scan is only able to scan container images from public repositories; for private image scanning, please use the Insights CI Script instead.
• Insights CI Integration: Recommended for organizations not using Github, this option involves executing our Insights CI script as part of your CI/CD pipelines. In addition, running Insights in your CI/CD pipeline allows you to optionally pull private images and scan them.

Insights will run the following report types in CI:

• Polaris (configuration validation for best practices)
• Trivy (scan Docker images for vulnerabilities)
• OPA (run custom policies)
• Pluto (detect deprecated resources)
• tfsec (scan Terraform files for configuration issues)

Comparing Auto-Scan and Insights CI Options

	Auto-Scan	Insights CI Integration
Key Differences	Requires GitHub. Enables IaC scanning on multiple repos in minutes. Does not scan private images (soon).	Works with popular CI/CD systems. Integrates into individual CI pipelines. Scans private images.
Target Use Case	DevOps Leaders adopting GitOps who need Infrastructure-as-Code scanning across multiple teams and repos quickly	DevOps Leaders with a few infrastructure repos, need to scan private images or need scanning to be done on their CI/CD compute
Main Value Proposition	- Add infrastructure-as-code scanning to multiple repos in minutes - Reduce cost of fixing issues	Reduce cost of fixing issues
GitHub Integration	Required	Optional
Where scans are run	Fairwinds Insights SaaS infrastructure	Your CI/CD platform
Automatic discovery of YAML/Helm charts in a repo	Yes	No - manually specify in fairwinds-insights.yaml
Publish scan results as a GitHub Comment	Yes	Yes (only if GitHub is integrated)
Publish GitHub commit status	Yes	Yes (only if GitHub is integrated)
Automated Pull Request Fix	Yes	Yes (only if GitHub is integrated)
Scan Container Images?	Yes - Public and Private images	Yes - Public and Private images
How do I get started?	Navigate to: Repositories > Add Repository > Connect GitHub	Navigate to: Repositories > Add Repository > Connect Manually