argo-cd/docs/user-guide/orphaned-resources.md

Orphaned Resources Monitoring

An orphaned Kubernetes resource is a top-level namespaced resource that does not belong to any Argo CD Application. The Orphaned Resources Monitoring feature allows detecting orphaned resources, inspecting/removing resources using the Argo CD UI, and generating a warning.

The Orphaned Resources monitoring is enabled in the Project settings. Below is an example of enabling the feature using the AppProject custom resource.

kind: AppProject
metadata:
  ...
spec:
  ...
  orphanedResources:
    warn: true
...

Once the feature is enabled, each project application that has any orphaned resources in its target namespace will get a warning. The orphaned resources can be located using the application details page by enabling the "Show Orphaned" filter:

When enabling the feature, you might want to consider disabling warnings at first.

spec:
  orphanedResources:
    warn: false # Disable warning

When warnings are disabled, application users can still view orphaned resources in the UI.

Exceptions

Not every resource in the Kubernetes cluster is controlled by the end user and managed by Argo CD. Other operators in the cluster can automatically create resources (e.g., the cert-manager creating secrets), which are then considered orphaned.

The following resources are never considered orphaned:

• Namespaced resources denied in the project. Usually, such resources are managed by cluster administrators and are not supposed to be modified by a namespace user.
• ServiceAccount with the name default (and the corresponding auto-generated ServiceAccountToken).
• Service with the name kubernetes in the default namespace.
• ConfigMap with the name kube-root-ca.crt in all namespaces.

You can prevent resources from being declared orphaned by providing a list of ignore rules, each defining a Group, Kind, and Name.

spec:
  orphanedResources:
    ignore:
    - kind: ConfigMap
      name: orphaned-but-ignored-configmap

The name can be a glob pattern, e.g.:

spec:
  orphanedResources:
    ignore:
    - kind: Secret
      name: *.example.com