Fairwinds | Blog

Fairwinds Insights Release Notes UTM Stack Support Customer Dashboard

Written by Munib Ali | Jul 15, 2025 9:13:17 PM

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working on making several significant updates to Fairwinds Insights. We’ve delivered some great new functionality that our Insights customers will definitely benefit from, including a new Customer Dashboard for Managed Services, UTM Stack support, and some useful improvements to our Global Admission Controller settings. Learn more about these new capabilities below.

Customer Dashboard

Fairwinds is excited to announce the roll out of our new Customer Dashboard for our Managed Services customers, which is designed to give your team a comprehensive view into your Kubernetes clusters that’s integrated directly into Fairwinds Insights. The key components of the dashboard include:

Current Activity: a detailed look at Incidents, CVE responses, and maintenance items.

Image Vulnerabilities: a quick glance of the number of critical and high vulnerabilities for Fairwinds and Managed Services customers.

MTD Cost Overview (month to date cluster cost vs prior month costs) and Average Utilization (cluster utilization for the last five days across all managed clusters).

Upcoming Upgrades (scheduled cluster and add-on upgrades), Work Items (a list of general customer requests tracked in Jira for the past two weeks), and History (a 30 day history of all incidents, CVE responses, and maintenance activities).

With this new dashboard, Managed Services customers will have the transparency and operational clarity to stay informed and in control of their Kubernetes clusters. Login to Fairwinds Insights to check out your dashboard today!

UTM Stack support

Fairwinds Insights now integrates with UTM Stack, an open source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solution powered by real-time correlation and threat intelligence. This integration automatically creates incidents in UTM Stack based on Action Items from Fairwinds Insights and keeps them in sync as statuses change on those Action Items. When an action item is resolved, reopened, or fixed, the corresponding incident in UTM Stack reflects those changes in near real-time (checking for updates every 5 minutes), ensuring your team stays informed and aligned.

Installation

Follow these steps to set up the UTM Stack integration.

Access Integration Settings

Navigate to your organization’s Settings > Integration page in Fairwinds Insights.

Initiate UTM Stack Integration

  • Locate the UTM Stack option, hover over it, and click Add Integration.

Configure the Integration

  • A popup will display, prompting you to enter the following details:
    • URL: The base URL of your UTM Stack instance (for example, https://your-utm-stack-instance.com).
    • User: The username of the UTM Stack account used for authentication.
    • Password: The password associated with the specified user account.
    • Click the Connect button to test your credentials.

Note: For security and clarity, consider creating a dedicated bot or service account in UTM Stack for this integration rather than using personal credentials.

  • Configure Policies and Save
    • Policies: This provides a list of Fairwinds Insights policies for which Action Items should generate incidents in UTM Stack. Only Action Items tied to these policies will be synced.
    • Click the Save Settings button to enable the integration.
    • Fairwinds Insights will begin syncing existing Action Items for the selected policies and will continue to update them as changes occur.

Using the Integration

Once activated, new Action Items in Fairwinds Insights that match your selected policies are automatically turned into incidents in UTM Stack. Updates to Action Items, such as marking them as resolved or fixed are reflected in the corresponding UTM Stack incidents.

Example of Fairwinds Insights generated incidents in UTM Stack.

Example of detailed incident information in UTM Stack.

Best Practices

  • Use a Dedicated Account: Use a bot or service account in UTM Stack for this integration to improve security and maintain separation from personal accounts.
  • Policy Selection: Choose policies thoughtfully to avoid flooding UTM Stack with unnecessary incidents. Focus on critical issues.
  • Regular Monitoring: Periodically review the Incidents section in UTM Stack to confirm that Action Items are syncing correctly.

Read more about the UTM Stack integration in our Fairwinds Insights documentation.

More Flexible Policy Enforcement

Fairwinds Insights now allows you to configure admission control settings (the policies that govern what can be admitted into your clusters) at two levels:

Per-Cluster Settings

  • You can customize admission controller behavior (such as blocking risky workloads, enforcing resource limits, or restricting privilege escalation) specifically for each individual Kubernetes cluster.
  • Useful if your clusters serve different environments (for example, dev vs. prod) or teams with varying risk profiles.

Org-Wide Default Settings

  • You can define a global default policy that applies to all clusters, which can help you maintain consistency or enforce org-wide security baselines.
  • Clusters without a custom config will inherit these defaults.

Customized enforcement gives you more control without requiring you to rewrite policy YAMLs for every cluster. Org-wide settings also mean less configuration drift and simpler compliance. As you manage more clusters, these new Insights capabilities mean you don’t have to micromanage policies for each one unless you want to.

Bug Fixes and Enhancements

Here are just a few of the enhancements and fixes that enable some of our bigger updates described above (and more on the way! Stay tuned!). 

  • Improve CVE report
  • Add UTM-Stack integration support
  • Add Customer Dashboard support
  • Trigger vulnerabilities sync when users access the Vulnerabilities page
  • Create admission settings for each org
  • Add utility function to log Go runtime and environment variables
  • API to download a CSV with policies enforced by Insights
  • Jira webhook support
  • New Feature: Ticket Additional Descriptions
  • Add support for team-management using AppGroups (beta)
  • New Feature: Organizations may now enable require re-authentication for owner actions
  • New Feature: CVE Audit Log Monthly Report Email
  • Fix a bug where not all labels from Jira were pulled
  • Add new combo-box fields for Jira ticket provider
  • Add auto-close code scan action items
  • Increase CVE audit log retention

Questions About Fairwinds Insights or Kubernetes?

Please reach out to us with any questions about Fairwinds Insights or how you can manage Kubernetes at scale without putting additional strain on your internal development and operations teams. We’d be happy to walk through any questions you have about the latest capabilities in Fairwinds Insights to help you take advantage of the new functionality we’re building. Please also consider joining the Fairwinds Community on Slack or our open source user group as well.

If you don’t want to spend time managing Kubernetes in-house, we also provide Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, a people-led service that builds, delivers, and maintains mission-critical Kubernetes infrastructure.

To stay up to date with Fairwinds Insights updates, read our release notes.