Kyverno Policy Reporter: Effortless Display Mode Switching

Kyverno's Policy Reporter is a powerful tool for managing and understanding your Kubernetes security policies. It provides different ways to visualize policy violations and resource compliance, but currently, switching between these views can be a bit clunky. This article explores the benefits of easily switching between display modes in Kyverno's Policy Reporter, a feature that could significantly enhance user experience and operational efficiency.

Understanding the Current Display Modes: Resources vs. Results

The Policy Reporter currently offers two primary display modes: resources and results. Each serves a distinct purpose and caters to different analytical needs. The resources display mode is invaluable when you want to get a comprehensive overview of your cluster's state, grouped by specific Kubernetes objects. For instance, if you're troubleshooting a particular type of resource like Deployments or Pods, this mode allows you to see all related policy violations associated with those resources in one place. This object-centric view is fantastic for understanding the impact of policies on individual components of your infrastructure. It helps answer questions like, "What policies are failing for this specific Pod?" or "How are policies affecting all my Services?". This can be particularly useful for developers or operations teams who are working directly with these resources and need to pinpoint issues quickly. The ability to see everything related to a single resource type streamlines the debugging process and provides a clear, organized perspective on compliance within that context. It’s about seeing the forest and the trees, where each resource is a tree, and the policies are the factors affecting its health.

On the other hand, the results display mode shifts the focus to the policy violations themselves. It presents a consolidated list of all reports, making it incredibly easy to get a quick snapshot of policy failures across your cluster. This report-centric view is ideal for security teams or compliance officers who need to quickly identify and address any policy that is currently being violated. For example, if you want to see all the fail statuses across your entire cluster at a glance, the results mode is your go-to. It provides a high-level summary of non-compliance, enabling rapid triage and prioritization of remediation efforts. This mode answers questions like, "Which policies are failing right now?" or "What is the overall compliance status of my cluster?". It’s a powerful tool for monitoring the general health of your security posture and ensuring that no critical violations are being overlooked. The clarity of seeing all failures together allows for efficient reporting and auditing, ensuring that the organization remains within its defined security parameters. This mode is about seeing the overall compliance landscape, where each failure is a clear indicator of a potential issue that needs attention.

The Need for a Policy-Centric View

While the resources and results modes offer valuable perspectives, there's a recognized need for a third display mode, perhaps named policies, that groups information by policy. This would complement the existing views by offering a policy-centric perspective. Imagine being able to see all the resources or results associated with a specific policy in one consolidated view. This would be incredibly beneficial for policy authors and administrators who are responsible for creating, maintaining, and refining security policies. They could easily see the impact of a particular policy across different resources and namespaces, helping them understand its effectiveness and identify potential conflicts or unintended consequences. This view would directly address the question, "Which resources are being affected by this particular policy?" or "How is this policy performing across the cluster?". This is particularly useful when iterating on a policy; you can quickly assess its effect without having to manually search through different resource views or sift through a long list of results. It allows for a more targeted approach to policy management and optimization, ensuring that policies are not only effective but also efficient and well-understood. This would greatly simplify the process of policy refinement and validation, leading to more robust and reliable security configurations within the Kubernetes environment.

Currently, a form of this policy-centric view exists in the global dashboards, which group policies by category and allow for drill-down to the policy level. However, these global dashboards are often inaccessible to regular users in many organizational setups. Users typically have restricted access, only being able to view dashboards that pertain to the specific namespaces they are responsible for. This limitation means that the valuable insights provided by the global policy-centric view are out of reach for many who could benefit from them. Therefore, integrating a similar view directly into the Policy Reporter, accessible within user-defined scopes, would be a significant improvement. It would empower a wider range of users to understand and manage policy compliance within their areas of responsibility, fostering a more distributed and effective approach to security governance.

The Power of Seamless Switching

Beyond introducing new display modes, the most significant quality-of-life improvement would be the ability to effortlessly switch between these modes. Currently, navigating between resources and results often involves modifying dashboard configurations or refreshing the page, which can be disruptive to the workflow. Imagine having a clear, prominent "Switch Display Mode" button directly within the Policy Reporter interface. Clicking this button would cycle through the available display modes – resources, results, and potentially the new policies view. This would allow users to quickly pivot their analysis based on their immediate needs. If they start by examining resources and then realize they need to see a summary of all failures, a single click would provide that view without disrupting their context. This intuitive navigation is crucial for efficient troubleshooting and monitoring. It reduces cognitive load and allows users to focus on the data rather than the interface.

This feature could be implemented by leveraging the existing display field within the dashboard configuration. To accommodate multiple modes and the desired switching functionality, the display field could be extended to accept a list of allowed modes. For example, a configuration could look like this:

# Option 1: Enforce a single display mode
display: results

# Option 2: Allow multiple display modes and enable switching
display: ['results', 'resources', 'policies']

When display is configured as a list, the Policy Reporter interface would present the