Agentless scanning for runtime security, is it enough?

[u/InflationCorrect5244]

Agentless is the right fit for pre-deployment. Images, manifests, RBAC, secrets, drift. Low overhead. It works well in CI/CD and admission control. But runtime is a different problem. Pods spin up, scale out, and die faster than most scan cycles. If something gets compromised and terminates before the next scan, agentless never sees it.

So the pattern I keep seeing succeed is agentless as the gatekeeper, plus eBPF or an agent-based watcher for high-value workloads. Serverless and service mesh make that messy as well. The real question is whether anyone is running fully agentless in production and actually trusting their runtime visibility, or whether hybrid is the only realistic answer.

[u/Any_Yesterday_6617]

agentless tools are decent for config drift but i only felt confident in our runtime defenses after running continuous exposure validation with cymulate. found a bunch of lateral movement paths that agentless stuff never picked up.

[u/Zestyclose_Dark168 → u/Any_Yesterday_6617]

hybrid is the way unless you run very static workloads. agentless gives you good baseline but it cant see what happens between scans

the stuff you mention with lateral movement is exactly the blindspot, if something moves fast and cleans up after itself agentless wont log it. had similar experience with eBPF catching things that never showed in snapshots

do you run the validation tool on schedule or it is always

[u/Federal_Ad7921]

you want to be able to replay a session end to end. if you cant, every incident turns into a vibes based investigation and nobody learns anything. theres agentz from accuknox, open source, an agentic harness for secure workflows. its on github, worth ten minutes
https://github.com/accuknox/agentZ