Runtime Security in Modern Cloud: Why Tracee Belongs in Your Stack
Modern organizations live in a constant state of deployment. New versions ship daily, infrastructure scales automatically, and containerized workloads move faster than traditional security models can follow. Yet, the more dynamic the environment, the higher the risk of blind spots at runtime. This article explores why runtime security has become a business-critical concern, how it impacts operational resilience, and how Aqua Security’s Tracee helps companies regain visibility and control—without slowing innovation.
In a landscape of constant change, traditional security layers focus on prevention, not observation. This section provides an overview of why runtime security fills the missing link between prevention and response.
As organizations move fast on Kubernetes and containers, most security spend goes into prevention (image scanning, CI/CD checks) and perimeter controls. The gap is runtime: what actually happens on hosts and inside containers after deploy. Tracee (by Aqua Security) offers lightweight, real-time detection of suspicious activity with minimal operational overhead. This paper explains the problem, decision criteria, and a practical operating model that combines both real-time detection and forensic visibility—without drowning teams in noise or cost.
Adding runtime visibility helps bridge the gap between what’s planned and what actually executes in production.
Security investments tend to overlook the runtime environment where actual attacks occur. The following points highlight the most common challenges organizations face.
Blind spots in production. Traditional tools don’t see kernel-level behaviors (e.g., process injection, strange file access, privilege escalation) that precede breaches.
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) is too high. Incidents escalate from minutes to hours; the longer they live, the higher the business impact.
Compliance & trust. Certifications (SOC 2/ISO) increasingly expect proof of runtime monitoring and incident reconstruction.
Team fatigue. Heavy agents and complex rules create noise and toil, not signal.
Addressing these gaps reduces operational risk and supports stronger incident response maturity.
Before implementing new tools, it’s important to define what effective runtime security looks like from a business outcome perspective.
Real-time tripwires for high-risk behaviors (not generic log searches).
Container-aware context (what pod, image, namespace, node) to speed triage.
Low overhead so it runs everywhere, all the time.
Evidence trail to answer: what ran, when, by whom, and with what impact?
A modern runtime strategy ensures visibility, accountability, and confidence without compromising performance.
Here we introduce Tracee, a purpose-built tool designed to bring observability and threat detection to the runtime layer.
Tracee is a runtime security and forensics tool that observes what actually happens in production and flags behaviors that matter. It’s lightweight, designed for containers/Kubernetes, and uses policy rules to detect risky activity in real time. You get actionable alerts and an audit trail—without intrusive kernel modules or complex deployments.
Why it fits decision-makers’ goals
Risk reduction: Earlier detection of live attacks (crypto-mining, escapes, tampering).
Operational simplicity: Small footprint; works with your current logging/monitoring.
Audit-ready: Clear evidence for post-incident analysis and compliance.
Tracee bridges the gap between prevention and detection, enabling faster and more confident responses.
Understanding where Tracee adds value helps clarify its role within an existing security stack.
Early breach detection: Spot processes and syscalls typical of exploits (e.g., privilege escalation) before data exfiltration.
Business-critical workload protection: Ensure production containers behave as intended; catch drift and policy violations.
Forensics after an incident: Reconstruct the timeline quickly to reduce downtime and narrative risk with customers/partners.
Change assurance: Observe runtime effects during hotfixes or major releases; validate no unexpected behaviors slip in.
Compliance evidence: Demonstrate continuous runtime monitoring and incident traceability.
These scenarios illustrate how runtime monitoring supports resilience, compliance, and business continuity.
An effective runtime approach blends immediate detection with data retention for future investigations.
Real-time detections: Immediate alerts on high-severity patterns to on-call/security (integrates with your alerting channel).
Forensic retention (selective): Persist event summaries to your log analytics (e.g., Loki/Elastic/SIEM) for investigations, with retention aligned to your risk & cost posture.
Outcome: Fast action on the few things that matter now, with the ability to investigate later when needed.
This dual model balances cost control and operational readiness, ensuring both visibility and focus.
Tracee fits naturally into the observability stack most companies already maintain.
At a glance
Tracee observes runtime events and applies rules →
Alerts flow to your existing incident channel (PagerDuty/OpsGenie/Slack via Alertmanager or webhook) →
Dashboards in Grafana for visibility & trends →
Storage of selected events in Loki/Elastic/SIEM for search and post-mortems.
Start by identifying high-friction developer tasks. Then build simple, composable, observable abstractions that evolve over time. That's platform engineering done right.
Why this works
Tracee observes runtime events and applies rules →
Alerts flow to your existing incident channel (PagerDuty/OpsGenie/Slack via Alertmanager or webhook) →
Dashboards in Grafana for visibility & trends →
Storage of selected events in Loki/Elastic/SIEM for search and post-mortems.
Minimal change to current monitoring stack.
Clear separation: detect now, analyze when needed.
Scales from a single cluster to multi-tenant environments.
This integration keeps operations efficient and reduces onboarding friction for teams.
Evaluating runtime tools can be simplified by comparing their performance against a few universal business metrics.
Effectiveness: Detects behaviors that precede damage → High
Noise footprint: Rule-based, container-aware → Low/Controllable
Cost to run: Lightweight, uses existing pipelines → Low
Time to value: Hours/days, not months → Fast
Compliance support: Evidence trail & policy enforcement → Strong
Tracee ranks consistently high across all categories, offering quick wins and measurable ROI.
To measure effectiveness, these metrics align security improvements with operational goals.
MTTD/MTTR for runtime incidents.
True-positive rate of high-severity alerts.
Time from alert to validated triage note (operator speed).
Forensic coverage (percentage of incidents with reconstructable timelines).
Monitoring these KPIs helps leadership quantify runtime visibility and incident response maturity.
Even effective solutions need thoughtful rollout to avoid common pitfalls.
Alert fatigue: Start with a curated, high-severity rule set; expand gradually.
Storage costs: Retain summaries/indices; archive raw detail only for critical namespaces.
Process change: Bake alerts into existing on-call and incident workflows (no parallel process).
Addressing these proactively ensures smooth adoption and long-term sustainability.
Gradual introduction reduces disruption while demonstrating quick value.
Pilot (1–2 weeks): Enable real-time detections on one cluster/namespace; route alerts to a dedicated channel; validate signal quality.
Scale (2–4 weeks): Roll out to additional clusters; send summaries to your log platform; create basic Grafana visibility.
Operationalize (ongoing): Tune rules quarterly; add use-case dashboards; align retention with risk appetite.
This phased approach allows organizations to learn, adapt, and scale responsibly.
Ultimately, Tracee is about control, clarity, and confidence at runtime.
Reduced breach window and reputational risk.
Faster investigations and clearer post-mortems for customers and auditors.
Predictable cost & simple operations by leveraging the stack you already have.
Tracee delivers measurable impact while maintaining operational simplicity.
