Sidecar Integration Overview

ALTR’s sidecar is a proxy — it does not directly connect to repositories the way ALTR connects to Snowflake or Databricks. Instead, the sidecar sits between data consumers and repositories, forwarding connections and applying access control and monitoring on the traffic that passes through it. The sidecar runs on customer infrastructure and reports to ALTR’s SaaS control plane.

Repository

The sidecar connects to a registered repository — ALTR’s term for a secured OLTP database. Impersonation lets a data consumer connect through the sidecar using a shared repository user’s credentials without ever handling them directly — see Impersonation Policy for the full value proposition, and Repositories for the distinction between repository users (used for impersonation) and repository service users (agent credentials).

Validated Databases

ALTR validates the sidecar integration against the following databases:

Microsoft SQL Server — 2019.
MySQL — 8.0.
Oracle — 19c.
PostgreSQL — 17.6.
MongoDB — 7.0. A MongoDB repository targets a single standalone mongod instance; contact ALTR support about replica sets or sharded clusters. MongoDB supports access control and database activity monitoring through the sidecar; contact ALTR support about classification and Security Intelligence Scout on MongoDB.

Monitoring Repository Activity

The sidecar captures query-level telemetry from every repository it’s connected to — who accessed the repository, when, and what query they ran. The Activity Monitoring Dashboard and Query Log describe where that captured activity surfaces and how to use it, across every data source, not just OLTP.

Security Intelligence Scout is a second, independent source of repository activity. Scout reads a database’s native audit trail on a polling basis rather than intercepting traffic like the sidecar, and its captured activity feeds the same Activity Monitoring Dashboard and Query Log views. Choose based on how each captures activity: the sidecar intercepts traffic inline, capturing every query in real time but requiring a component in the connection path, while Scout polls the database’s own audit trail on a schedule, adding no connection overhead but limited to what the native audit facility records. A repository can be monitored by the sidecar, by Scout, or by both at once — the 2 capture paths run independently of each other, and activity they both capture for the same repository isn’t deduplicated between them. See Database Activity Monitoring with Agents for Scout’s own setup, scan tasks, and monitoring model.

Open Source Licenses

ALTR’s sidecar uses the following open source licenses: