What Are Runtime Insights?

Runtime insights definition

Runtime insights are the actionable information and signals needed to understand the real-time context around vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats that cloud security tools discover. With runtime insights, security teams can understand what issues exist and how to remediate them.

A 2025 Sysdig report on cloud-native security and usage showed that in less than 10 minutes, threat actors can go from using stolen credentials to full exploitation. Periodic security scanning works poorly against cloud threats – real-time detection and response is needed.

Static scanning offers a point-in-time visualization of vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but isn't continuous, which gives threat actors an opportunity to act with sophisticated attacks that work quickly.

This is why robust cloud security requires runtime protection, which secures cloud workloads (e.g., containers, VMs, and serverless functions) where they are executed. Runtime security enhances visibility into cloud infrastructure, applications, and systems to close security gaps and weaknesses.

Runtime insights contextualize the telemetry collected around vulnerabilities and threats in real time, so organizations can correlate events, prioritize risk, and remediate the appropriate issues.

Runtime insights power multiple use cases, including:

• Vulnerability management: Teams get overwhelmed by the amount of vulnerabilities that exist and may work on fixing them without any true direction. Context of which vulnerabilities are tied to active packages ensures that teams can prioritize critical vulnerabilities with the most risk and chance of exploitation.
• Cloud security posture management: Cloud misconfigurations create unknown attack vectors and applications suffer from posture drift. CSPM tools identify where those issues exist, while runtime insights enable risk prioritization and tie misconfigurations to runtime threats.
• Cloud infrastructure entitlement management: CIEM tools help discover overprivileged accounts, while runtime insights provide visibility into which permissions should be revoked based on real usage patterns.
• Cloud detection and response: CDR tools find and respond to sophisticated cloud threats legacy EDR tools cannot. Adding runtime insights provides real-time response and enhances incident investigations.

Why are runtime insights important?

Keeping cloud environments, applications, and data secure from threat actors is a challenge for many organizations. Protecting cloud workloads from threats and systems from misconfigurations requires having extensive visibility into your entire cloud infrastructure. 

Security gaps can open the door for threat actors, from poor software supply chain security to using third-party libraries and components with unknown vulnerabilities in your application development.

Runtime insights can help security teams keep up with zero-day vulnerabilities and threats, which is critical to effective workload protection. You get a real-time, comprehensive view into your security systems to find gaps before threat actors do.

Additionally, many cloud-native security tools can find all the disparate vulnerabilities and threats, but don’t necessarily explain how much risk each issue has. Runtime insights provide that much-needed context to determine risk prioritization and incident response.

Runtime insights also help organizations implement shift-left security, which involves embedding security into the software development lifecycle. From there, organizations can shield right by protecting applications and data at runtime.

Benefits of runtime insights

Runtime insights provide the context behind the signals and telemetry collected by CDR solutions and other security tools.

Runtime insights benefits include:

• Reduce noise: Security teams are short on time and need to know where their efforts will improve security effectively and efficiently. Runtime insights helps with determining which alerts need to be addressed first and which don’t present real risk.
• Prioritize vulnerabilities: Understand which critical vulnerabilities are in use in active packages and are likely to be exploited, so you can fix them first.
• Discover and fix misconfigurations: Identify and remediate misconfigurations and elevated permissions before attackers can exploit them.
• Enhances security tool usage: Cloud security tools, such as cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP) and CSPM, can discover and remediate vulnerabilities and threats, but benefit from context, risk prioritization, and additional visibility.

How runtime security becomes runtime insights

Runtime insights strengthen protection for cloud workloads and infrastructure by grounding security decisions in what’s happening at runtime. They are derived from telemetry across containers, VMs, Kubernetes, and cloud accounts, providing the live context needed to assess risk.

Runtime insights come from system-level telemetry around process execution, file activity, privilege changes, and network connections. For the service and orchestration layer, telemetry includes cloud API calls, identity and access management role behavior, service-to-service communication, and workload metadata. These signals give insight into what is happening in a user’s environment right now.

With this data, security teams can correlate disparate events to understand what is happening in real time. For example, if a container launches a reverse shell, the collected telemetry, such as system calls, container metadata, process execution, and identities can be correlated to derive runtime insights, such as what lateral movement occurred.

Stay ahead of evolving cloud threats with Sysdig runtime insights

Sophisticated security threats to the cloud require deep visibility and context to identify and mitigate. Runtime insights help you to discover and mitigate malware, find and remediate vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, and get real-time security for cloud workloads.

Sysdig continuously collects and correlates telemetry across your cloud environment, enabling you and your organization to extract meaningful runtime insights to stay ahead of security threats and detect and respond before data breaches occur. Reduce vulnerabilities, close permission gaps, uncover hidden attack vectors, and stop cloud breaches in real time with Sysdig, powered by Falco.