Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 6, 2014

PgOSQuery [OSQuery for Postgres]

Filed under: osquery,PostgreSQL — Patrick Durusau @ 12:58 pm

PgOSQuery

From the webpage:

So I saw Facebook’s OSQuery, and thought “That looks awesome, but complicated to build on top of SQLite. Postgres’ Foreign Data Wrappers seem like a much better foundation. How long would it take to write the same app on top of Postgres?”. Turns out it takes about 15 minutes, for someone who’s never written an FDW before 🙂

This approach does have the downside that it runs as the postgres user rather than as root, so it can’t see the full details of other people’s processes, but I’m sure that could be worked around if you really want to.

Currently this is just a proof-of-concept to see how useful Postgres’ foreign data wrappers are, and how easy they are to create with the Multicorn python library. Seems the answers are “very useful” and “very easy”. If people want to make this more useful by adding more virtual tables, pull requests are welcome~

The system information captured by OSQuery and PgOSQuery is always present. But in order to talk about it (in terms of recorded information), you must capture that information and, just as importantly, have a method to associate your comments with that information.

Any database could capture the system information captured by OSQuery and PgSQLQuery. But having captured it, how do you talk about the column headers for the data? Data dictionaries are an option if your database supports them, but then how do you talk about the entry in your data dictionary?

Not that you are required to talk about entries in your data dictionary but it should be a design choice to not talk about data dictionary entries, not a default cone of silence.

October 29, 2014

Introducing osquery

Filed under: Facebook,osquery — Patrick Durusau @ 4:03 pm

Introducing osquery by Mike Arpaia.

From the post:

Maintaining real-time insight into the current state of your infrastructure is important. At Facebook, we’ve been working on a framework called osquery which attempts to approach the concept of low-level operating system monitoring a little differently.

Osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This design allows you to write SQL-based queries efficiently and easily to explore operating systems. With osquery, SQL tables represent the current state of operating system attributes, such as:

  • running processes
  • loaded kernel modules
  • open network connections

SQL tables are implemented via an easily extendable API. Several tables already exist and more are being written. To best understand the expressiveness that is afforded to you by osquery, consider the following examples….

I haven’t installed osquery, yet, but suspect that most of the data it collects is available now through a variety of admin tools. But not through a single tool that enables you to query across tables to combine that data. That is the part that intrigues me.

Code and documentation on Github.

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