[Updated post as of October 22, 2020]

While many Anchore Enterprise users are familiar with our open source Anchore Engine tool and have a good understanding of the way Anchore works, getting started with the additional features provided by the full product may at first seem overwhelming.

In this blog, we will walk through some of the major capabilities of Anchore Enterprise in order to help you get the most value from our product. From basic user interface (UI) usage to enabling third-party notifications, the following sections describe some common things to first explore when adopting Anchore Enterprise.

The Enterprise User Interface

Perhaps the most notable feature of Anchore Enterprise is the addition of a UI to help you navigate various features of Anchore, such as adding images and repositories, configuring policy bundle and whitelists, and scheduling or viewing reports.

The UI helps simplify the usability of Anchore by allowing you to perform normal Anchore actions without requiring a strong understanding of command-line tooling. This means that instead of editing a policy bundle as a JSON file, you can instead use a simple-to-use GUI to directly add or edit policy bundles, rule definitions, and other policy-based features.

Check out our documentation for more information on getting started with the Anchore Enterprise UI.

Advanced Vulnerability Feeds

With the move to Anchore Enterprise, you have the ability to include third-party entitlements that grant access to enhanced vulnerability feed data from Risk Based Security’s VulnDB. You can also analyze Windows-based containers using vulnerability data provided by Microsoft Security Research Center (MSRC).

Additionally, feed sync statuses can be viewed directly in the UI’s System Dashboard, giving you insight into the status of the data feeds along with the health of the underlying Anchore services. You can read more about enabling and configuring Anchore to use a localized feed service.

Note: Enabling the on-premise (localized) feeds service is required to enable VulnDB and Windows feeds, as these feed providers are not included in the data provided by our feed service.

Enterprise Authentication

In addition to Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) to enhance user and account management, Anchore Enterprise includes the ability to configure an external authentication provider using LDAP, or OAuth / SAML.

Single Sign-On can be configured via OAuth / SAML support, allowing you to configure Anchore Enterprise to use an external Identity Provider such as Keycloak, Okta, or Google-SSO (among others) in order to fit into your greater organizational identity management workflow.

You can use the system dashboard provided by the UI to configure these features, making integration straightforward and easy to view.

Take a look at our RBAC, LDAP, or our SSO documentation for more information on authentication/authorization options in Anchore Enterprise.

Third-Party Notifications

By using our Notifications service, you can configure your Anchore Enterprise deployment to send alerts to external endpoints (Email, GitHub, Slack, and more) about system events such as policy evaluation results, vulnerability updates, and system errors.

Notification endpoints can be configured and managed through the UI, along with the specific events that fit your organizational needs. The currently supported endpoints are:

  • Email—Send notifications to a specific SMTP mail service
  • GitHub—Version control for software development using Git
  • JIRA—Issue tracking and agile product management software by Atlassian
  • Slack—Team collaboration software tools and online services by Slack Technologies
  • Teams—Team collaboration software tools and online services by Microsoft
  • Webhook—Send notifications to a specific API endpoint

For more information on managing notifications in Anchore Enterprise, take a look at our documentation on notifications.

Conclusion

In this blog, we provided a high-level overview of several features to explore when first starting out with Anchore Enterprise. There are multiple other features that we didn’t touch on, so check out our product comparison page for a list of other features included in Anchore Enterprise vs. our open-source Engine offering.

Take a look at our FAQs for more information.