Introduction

Fleet is the most widely used open source osquery manager in the world. Fleet enables programmable live queries, streaming logs, and realtime visibility of 100,000+ servers, containers, and laptops. It's especially useful for IT, security, and compliance use cases.

The Fleet application contains two single static binaries which provide web based administration, REST API, and CLI interface to Fleet.

The fleet binary contains:

• The Fleet TLS web server (no external webserver is required but it supports a proxy if desired)
• The Fleet web interface
• The Fleet application management REST API
• The Fleet osquery API endpoints

The fleetctl binary is the CLI interface which allows management of your deployment, scriptable live queries, and easy integration into your existing logging, alerting, reporting, and management infrastructure.

Both binaries are available for download from our repo.

Infrastructure dependencies

Fleet currently has three infrastructure dependencies: MySQL, Redis, and a TLS certificate.

MySQL

Fleet uses MySQL extensively as its main database. Many cloud providers (such as AWS and GCP) host reliable MySQL services which you may consider for this purpose. A well-supported MySQL Docker image also exists if you would rather run MySQL in a container. For more information on how to configure the fleet binary to use the correct MySQL instance, see the Configuration document.

Fleet requires at least MySQL version 5.7, and is tested using the InnoDB storage engine.

There are many "drop-in replacements" for MySQL available. If you'd like to experiment with some bleeding-edge technology and use Fleet with one of these alternative database servers, we think that's awesome! Please be aware they are not officially supported and that it is very important to set up a dev environment to thoroughly test new releases.

Redis

Fleet uses Redis to ingest and queue the results of distributed queries, cache data, etc. Many cloud providers (such as AWS and GCP) host reliable Redis services which you may consider for this purpose. A well supported Redis Docker image also exists if you would rather run Redis in a container. For more information on how to configure the fleet binary to use the correct Redis instance, see the Configuration document.

TLS certificate

In order for osqueryd clients to connect, the connection to Fleet must use TLS. The TLS connection may be terminated by Fleet itself, or by a proxy serving traffic to Fleet.

• The CNAME or one of the Subject Alternate Names (SANs) on the certificate must match the hostname that osquery clients use to connect to the server/proxy.
• If you intend to have your Fleet instance on a subdomain, your certificate can have a wildcard SAN. So fleet.example.com should match a SAN of *.example.com
• If self-signed certificates are used, the full certificate chain must be provided to osquery via the --tls_server_certs flag.
• If Fleet terminates TLS, consider using an ECDSA (rather than RSA) certificate, as RSA certificates have been associated with performance problems in Fleet due to Go's standard library TLS implementation.

Community projects

Below are some projects created by Fleet community members. These projects provide additional solutions for deploying Fleet. Please submit a pull request if you'd like your project featured.

• CptOfEvilMinions/FleetDM-Automation - Ansible and Docker code to set up Fleet

Need more help?

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