While they do offer some basic reporting, more comprehensive reporting would be beneficial in the long run. This would allow me to demonstrate the value of the product over time to continue to effectively budget for this subscription, especially as they add features that may come at an additional cost. I appreciate the improvements made to reporting over the past year, but continued development in this area will be appreciated.

We have encountered occasional difficulties with the Single Sign-On process. There is room for improvement in its current implementation. It works, but was not quite as smooth as the rest of the GitGuardian experience.

For remediation, GitGuardian is quite good at pointing out all the incidents and helping us handle them. However, remediation is mostly in our hands. We have to go in and resettle. If they could detect secrets before they end up in our GitHub, that is the only improvement that would be a meaningful improvement from what they have. 

Right now, we are like the SRE team for the company. We need to monitor all the secrets, because when we give somebody access, they either see nothing or everything in GitGuardian. We would like to be able to tune it so developers can see the secrets that GitGuardian detected in their own repositories and teams. Then, they could manage it themselves. We wouldn't have to be in the middle anymore. We could just supervise and make sure that they do fix it. For example, if they might not care about their secrets getting spilled into Git, then we need to get our stick and chase them around the office.

We have been somewhat confused by the dashboard at times.

Six months ago, I would have said improving the ability to automatically get feedback from a developer so we wouldn't need to take action when reaching out, but that has been addressed.

They could give a developer access to a dashboard for their team's repositories that just shows their repository secrets. I think more could be exposed to developers.

GitGuardian encompasses many secrets that companies might have, but we are a Microsoft-only organization, so there are some limitations there in terms of their honey tokens. I'd like for it to not be limited to Amazon-based tokens. It would be nice to see a broader set of providers that you could pick from. 

In three years, we have had only one major hiccup, a development bug that was very quickly fixed. 

There is room for improvement in its integration for bug-tracking. It should be more direct. They have invested a lot in user management, but they need to invest in integrations. That is a real lack.

The GitGuardian hook and dashboard scanners are essential components that should seamlessly integrate to provide comprehensive security coverage. However, we've encountered instances where discrepancies arise, with the dashboard scan detecting issues not reflected on the hook. This inconsistency requires fine-tuning to ensure efficient detection and resolution, as we aim to avoid unnecessary time wastage.

Moreover, the historical scan feature could benefit from improvement. Occasionally, it fails to efficiently track changes in updated histories, leading to delays in data history updates. This can be frustrating, especially when the reported secret remains unchanged or changed in history. Addressing this issue is crucial to alleviate the burden on the team and streamline our workflow. We hope to see enhancements in this aspect from GitGuardian.

GitGuardian had a really nice feature that allowed you to compare all the public GitHub repositories against your code base and see if your code leaked. They discontinued it for some reason about eight months ago, it was in preview and kinda exploratory phase, but for whatever reason, they chose not to move forward with it. 

That is unfortunate because it immediately detected a leak of our company code that one of our contractors committed. They leaked our intellectual property into one of their public reports. 

It took us a while to get new patterns introduced into the pattern reporting process. If there is a way to automate this process so that we can include our own patterns in our repositories, that would be very useful.

The authentication process could be improved. A single sign-on system would be very helpful.

The good thing about GitGuardian is that we don't get many false positives. The issue with this kind of tool is that it detects secrets but it can also detect some things that are not secrets, and you have to manage an incident for something that is not an incident. But we tested multiple secret detection tools and GitGuardian was pretty good, not having many false positives.

There is also something we shared with them already about user management with teams. They have an integration with Okta to manage our employees' access to the tools. It would be best to have different teams. In our engineering department we have a lot of different teams, and the more we grow the more teams we will have. But currently, you can only assign one person to an incident. We would like to have the ability to assign it to a team because code, in our company, is owned by a team and not one person. That's one feature that's really lacking in GitGuardian.

GitGuardian could have more detailed information on what software engineers can do. It only provides some highly generic feedback when a secret is detected. They should have outside documentation. We send this to our software engineers, who are still doing the commits. It's the wrong way to work, but they are accustomed to doing it this way. When they go into that ticket, they see a few instructions that might be confusing. If I see a leaked secret committed two years ago, it's not enough to undo that commit. I need to go in there, change all my code to utilize GitHub secrets, and go on AWS to validate my key.

It would be helpful to have small instructions to show developers how to deal with an issue. They ask us what they need to do each time, but it's always more or less the same. GitGuardian could send them clear steps, so they can engage without needing help every time. 

The main thing for me is the customization for some of the healthcare-specific identifiers that we want to validate. There should be some ability, which is coming in the near future, to have custom identifiers. Being in healthcare, we have pretty specific patterns that we need to match for PHI or PII. Having that would add a little bit extra to it.

In addition to the customization, having some kind of linking on the integration would be another improvement. The product itself is very good at grouping the same incident, but if it detected a test credential that didn't have remediation and that same one comes up in a new commit, it can be harder to find the new one. If you have a new instance of an older remediation, making sure that you're seeing the same one can be a little bit tricky. We had that issue more when we first started and hadn't gone through the original list. Now that it is cleaned up, it is less of an issue.

I'm interested in their new product features. Honeytokens are something we deployed when it was an open source project. Now that is integrated into the platform. It's in beta right now, and they're branching out into additional vulnerabilities. 

It would be nice if they supported detecting PII or had some kind of data loss prevention feature.

I am unsure if they have a mobile app. That could be a feature or improvement in the future. A lot of our security dashboards don't have a phone app. A phone app helps because you can monitor things on the go. We are using the Darktrace solution that allows alerts on our phones, and we configure the alert threshold. That helps a lot. I think that a mobile app could be something that could be added in the future pipeline, if there is any demand.

I would like to see more fine-grained access controls when tickets are assigned for incidents. I would like the ability to provide more controls to the team leads or the product managers so that they can drive what we, the AppSec team, are doing. They should have the ability to close out tickets and we would review them. 

Right now, we cannot give them that control because if they close out a ticket, we won't have the visibility into them unless we build something with the APIs that GitGuardian provides. 

The UI has matured quite a bit since we started using it, and they have introduced new features, such as the teams feature. That was introduced three or four months ago. We put in the requests for such features. There are a few more requests that we think would make the product even better, and one of them is that fine-grained access control so that we have additional roles we can assign to other teams. That would help things to be more of a self-service model.

It could be easier. They have a CLI tool that engineers can run on their laptops, but getting engineers to install the tool is a manual process. I would like to see them have it integrated into one of those developer tools, e.g., VS Code or JetBrains, so developers don't have to think about it. However, it is moving in the right direction.

I would like to see them take their CLI tooling and make first-level plugins for major development platforms so I don't have to write a script to help engineers set up the CLI tool for their own workstations. That could use some improvement. 

When we add new repositories, they don't immediately get a historical scan. Every now and then, when I log into the interface, it is like, "You have five repositories that haven't had a historical scan," and I have to go enable it. That seems weird. It should be automatic.

It is email, so it is out-of-band, which is what we need. It would be cooler if it could be done through Slack or some other means for more urgency. However, it meets our needs. Most of the time, our security team is US-based. A lot of our engineers are in European countries and even places like Australia, so there is a lot of asynchronous work.

An area for improvement is the front end for incidents. The user experience in this area could be much better.

There is room for improvement in GitGuardian on Azure DevOps. The implementation is a bit hard there. This is one of the things we requested help with. I would not say their support is not good, but they need them to improve in helping customers on that side.

One improvement that I'd like to see is a cleaner for Splunk logs. It would be nice to have a middle man for anything we send or receive from Splunk forwarders. I'd love to see it get cleaned by GitGuardian or caught to make sure we don't have any secrets getting committed to Splunk logs. That was an issue that I brought up a while ago. However, my workload just hasn't allowed me to sit down and figure out how to solve that. That is one thing that I wanted to see if I can use in that regard because secrets are a thing that ends up in logs, and that's not something we want.