osquery

osquery is an operating system instrumentation framework for OSX and Linux. osquery makes low-level operating system analytics and monitoring both performant and intuitive.

osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL-based queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as

• running processes
• loaded kernel modules
• open network connections

SQL tables are implemented via an easily extendable API. A variety of tables already exist and more are being written.

To best understand the expressiveness that is afforded to you by osquery, consider the following SQL queries:

--------------------------------------------------------
-- get the name, pid and attached port of all processes 
-- which are listening on all interfaces
--------------------------------------------------------
SELECT DISTINCT 
  process.name, 
  listening.port, 
  process.pid
FROM processes AS process
JOIN listening_ports AS listening
ON process.pid = listening.pid
WHERE listening.address = '0.0.0.0';

--------------------------------------------------------
-- find every launchdaemon on an OS X host which 
--   * launches an executable when the operating 
--     system starts
--   * keeps the executable running 
-- return the name of the launchdaemon and the full 
-- path (with arguments) of the executable to be ran.
--------------------------------------------------------
SELECT 
  name, 
  program || program_arguments AS executable 
FROM launchd 
WHERE 
  (run_at_load = 'true' AND keep_alive = 'true') 
AND 
  (program != '' OR program_arguments != '');

These queries can be:

• performed on an ad-hoc basis to explore operating system state
• executed via a scheduler to monitor operating system state across a distributed set of hosts over time
• launched from custom applications using osquery APIs

Install

OS X

The easiest way to install osquery on OS X is via Homebrew. Check the Homebrew homepage for installation instructions.

Run the following:

brew update
brew install osquery

To update osquery:

brew update
brew upgrade osquery

Linux

We don't currently supply pre-built osquery packages for Linux. We do, however, provide Vagrant VMs which allow you to easily create packages for Ubuntu 12.04+ and CentOS 6.5. Check out the wiki's installation guide for more information.

If you're trying to build osquery on a different, currently unsupported operating system, please refer to the building the code guide for help.

Learn more

Read the launch blog post for background on the project.

If you're interested in learning more about osquery, visit the wiki.