osquery is a SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics framework.
Available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD.

Information and resources

What is osquery?

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, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes.

SQL tables are implemented via a simple plugin and extensions API. A variety of tables already exist and more are being written: https://osquery.io/schema. To best understand the expressiveness that is afforded to you by osquery, consider the following SQL queries:

List the users:

Check the processes that have a deleted executable:

SELECT * FROM processes WHERE on_disk = 0;

Get the process name, port, and PID, for processes listening on all interfaces:

SELECT DISTINCT processes.name, listening_ports.port, processes.pid
  FROM listening_ports JOIN processes USING (pid)
  WHERE listening_ports.address = '0.0.0.0';

Find every macOS LaunchDaemon that launches an executable and keeps it running:

SELECT name, program || program_arguments AS executable
  FROM launchd
  WHERE (run_at_load = 1 AND keep_alive = 1)
  AND (program != '' OR program_arguments != '');

Check for ARP anomalies from the host's perspective:

SELECT address, mac, COUNT(mac) AS mac_count
  FROM arp_cache GROUP BY mac
  HAVING count(mac) > 1;

Alternatively, you could also use a SQL sub-query to accomplish the same result:

SELECT address, mac, mac_count
  FROM
    (SELECT address, mac, COUNT(mac) AS mac_count FROM arp_cache GROUP BY mac)
  WHERE mac_count > 1;

These queries can be:

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

Download & Install

To download the latest stable builds and for repository information and installation instructions visit https://osquery.io/downloads.

We use a simple numbered versioning scheme X.Y.Z, where X is a major version, Y is a minor, and Z is a patch. We plan minor releases roughly every two months. These releases are tracked on our Milestones page. A patch release is used when there are unforeseen bugs with our minor release and we need to quickly patch. A rare 'revision' release might be used if we need to change build configurations.

Major, minor, and patch releases are tagged on GitHub and can be viewed on the Releases page. We open a new Release Checklist issue when we prepare a minor release. If you are interested in the status of a release, please find the corresponding checklist issue, and note that the issue will be marked closed when we are finished the checklist. We consider a release 'in testing' during the period of hosting new downloads on our website and adding them to our hosted repositories. We will mark the release as 'stable' on GitHub when enough testing has occurred, this usually takes two weeks.

Build from source

Building osquery from source is encouraged! Check out our build guide. Also check out our contributing guide and join the community on Slack.

License

By contributing to osquery you agree that your contributions will be licensed as defined on the LICENSE file.

Vulnerabilities

We keep track of security announcements in our tagged version release notes on GitHub. We aggregate these into SECURITY.md too.

Learn more

The osquery documentation is available online. Documentation for older releases can be found by version number, as well.

If you're interested in learning more about osquery read the launch blog post for background on the project, visit the users guide.

Development and usage discussion is happening in the osquery Slack, grab an invite here!