mission-control-overview

name	mission-control-overview
description	High-level guide to Flanksource Mission Control — an Internal Developer Platform for Kubernetes. Use when users ask what Mission Control is, available CRDs, and quick-start actions (scrapers, scrape plugins, health checks, notifications, silences, playbooks, views, and connections).

Flanksource Mission Control — Overview Skill

MANDATORY FIRST STEP — DO THIS BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE

Fetch and read https://flanksource.com/llms.txt right now. This is a sitemap of every concept, feature, and reference page in Mission Control. Reading it gives you a complete picture of what is available so you can answer accurately. Do not skip this step. Do not answer before reading it.

What Is Mission Control?

Flanksource Mission Control is an Internal Developer Platform that helps teams improve developer productivity and operational resilience.

With Mission Control you can:

• Catalog and track changes on infrastructure, applications and configuration.
• Empower Developers with self-service playbooks for Day 0-2 operations.
• Run Health Checks across both cloud-native and legacy infrastructure and applications.
• Incrementally Adopt GitOps with playbooks that perform Git commits in the background.
• Aggregate Alerts from Prometheus, Cloudwatch, etc.
• Build Event Driven Control Planes with a combination of webhooks, events and GitOps.
• Notify People and Systems about changes in health and configuration.

Mission Control itself adds orchestration, automation, and a web UI on top of these engines via its own CRDs:

CRD	Purpose
Playbook	Multi-step runbook automation (exec, gitops, http, github, notification, SQL, logs, AI)
Notification	Alert routing to Slack, email, Teams, webhooks, playbooks, and more
NotificationSilence	Suppress notifications by resource selector, time window, and CEL filter
Connection	Centralized credential & endpoint management (AWS, GCP, Azure, Git, Slack, SMTP, etc.)
View	Custom dashboards with SQL/catalog/config queries, panels, and table layouts
Application	Logical grouping of resources with environments, roles, and access reviews
Scope	Resource-scoped access control boundaries
Permission	Fine-grained access control (RBAC + ABAC)
Team	User groups for access control and notification routing

Mission Control Registry

The mission-control-registry provides ready-made Helm charts for common integrations:

Chart	What it sets up
mission-control	Core Mission Control deployment (PostgreSQL, Redis)
kubernetes	Kubernetes cluster scraping
kubernetes-view	Pre-built Kubernetes dashboard views
aws	AWS resource scraping
azure	Azure resource scraping
gcp	Google Cloud resource scraping
flux	Flux GitOps integration
argocd	ArgoCD integration
prometheus	Prometheus integration
playbooks-kubernetes	Kubernetes automation playbooks (scale, restart, drain, logs, delete, etc.)
misc-playbooks	Miscellaneous Playbooks
playbooks-flux	Flux GitOps playbooks (reconcile, suspend/resume)
playbooks-ai	AI-powered troubleshooting playbooks
mongo-atlas	MongoDB Atlas monitoring
postgres	PostgreSQL monitoring
mssql	SQL Server monitoring
helm	Helm release monitoring

Use these registry charts to understand and enable integrations in an existing Mission Control setup.

Core Features

1. Catalog (config-db)

A JSON-based CMDB that scrapes and tracks configuration from multiple sources.

Scraper types (high level): Kubernetes, Kubernetes File, AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, Azure DevOps, HTTP, File, Exec, SQL (Postgres/MSSQL/ClickHouse), Logs, PubSub, Slack, Trivy, Terraform

Key capabilities:

• Full config JSON stored and searchable
• Change tracking with JSON patches and diff
• Health status derivation from config state
• Parent/child relationships and dependency graphs
• Cost tracking per resource
• Insights ingestion (security, cost, reliability, compliance)
• Access log/audit ingestion for external users
• Labels and tags for filtering

CRDs: ScrapeConfig, ScrapePlugin (configs.flanksource.com/v1)

ScrapePlugin capabilities:

• Global change exclusion and change-type mapping
• Global retention policies for config items and changes
• Relationship and property enrichment shared across scrapers

2. Health Checks (canary-checker)

Kubernetes-native health monitoring with 35+ built-in check types.

Check categories:

• Protocol: HTTP, DNS, ICMP, TCP
• Data sources: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, LDAP, Prometheus
• Alerts: Prometheus AlertManager, AWS CloudWatch, Dynatrace
• Integration testing: JUnit, JMeter, K6, Newman, Playwright
• File systems: Local, S3, GCS, SFTP, SMB
• Infrastructure: EC2, Kubernetes Pod/Ingress, S3 protocol
• Config: AWS Config, AWS Config Rule, Catalog query, Kubernetes resources
• Backups: GCP databases, Restic

Key capabilities:

• Scriptable with CEL, JavaScript, Go templates
• Transform responses into multiple sub-checks (fan-out)
• Custom Prometheus metrics export
• JUnit import/export for CI/CD
• Secret management via K8s secrets

CRD: Canary (canaries.flanksource.com/v1)

3. Playbooks

Multi-step automation runbooks triggered manually, on events, on webhooks, or on schedule.

Action types:

• exec — run shell commands (on agent or in pods)
• http — make HTTP requests
• sql — execute SQL queries
• gitops — create commits, branches, PRs (GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps)
• github — trigger GitHub Actions workflows
• azureDevopsPipeline — trigger Azure DevOps pipelines
• notification — send notifications
• pod — create and manage pods
• logs — query logs (Loki, CloudWatch, OpenSearch, Kubernetes)
• ai — invoke LLM analysis

Key capabilities:

• Parameters with types (text, checkbox, code, config, people, team, duration, list, etc.)
• Approval workflows
• Event-driven triggers (config changes, health failures, etc.)
• Webhook triggers
• Resource selectors to scope which configs/checks can trigger
• Step chaining with templated context

CRD: Playbook (mission-control.flanksource.com/v1)

4. Notifications

Event-driven alerting with templated messages.

Recipients: email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, ntfy, Pushover, Pushbullet, webhooks, playbooks

Key capabilities:

• Event filtering (config changes, health check failures, etc.)
• CEL-based filters for fine-grained control
• Go template-based title/body
• Repeat intervals and grouping
• Fallback recipients with delay
• Rate limiting

CRD: Notification (mission-control.flanksource.com/v1)

5. Notification Silences

Suppress notifications by resource, time window, or condition.

Key capabilities:

• Resource selectors (by type, name, labels, tags)
• Time windows (from/until)
• Recursive silencing (parent + children)
• CEL filter expressions

CRD: NotificationSilence (mission-control.flanksource.com/v1)

6. Connections

Centralized credential and endpoint management.

Supported types: AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Git, GitHub, GitLab, HTTP, Slack, SMTP, Telegram, Discord, ntfy, Pushover, Pushbullet, SFTP, SMB, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama, Azure DevOps

CRD: Connection (mission-control.flanksource.com/v1)

7. Views

Custom dashboards with SQL, catalog, and config-based queries.

Key capabilities:

• Multi-query data aggregation with merge/join
• Column definitions with types
• Panel-based visualizations (cards, tables)
• Template variables for dynamic filtering
• Section composition (embed other views)
• Plugin system to attach views as tabs on config pages
• Caching with configurable max/min age

CRD: View (mission-control.flanksource.com/v1)

8. Access Control

Fine-grained access control with scopes and teams.

CRDs: Permission, PermissionGroup, Scope, Team

Quick-Start Actions

Common first actions in Mission Control:

1. Create a Canary health check
2. Create a ScrapeConfig to ingest infrastructure configs
3. Add a ScrapePlugin for global change filtering/mapping/retention
4. Create Notification routing for key events
5. Create NotificationSilence windows for maintenance
6. Create Playbooks for self-service automation
7. Create Connections for credentials and endpoints
8. Create Views for Grafana like dashboards
9. Explore integration bundles from the mission-control-registry

References:

• references/schemas.md — OpenAPI schemas for all CRDs across canary-checker, config-db, and mission-control