Hey everyone! 👋 I've been deep in the vulnerability management world for years, mostly with Qualys VM for our traditional infrastructure. But with our shift to Kubernetes and a much heavier container workload, we're seriously evaluating Aqua Security. The container-native focus is really appealing.
I'm wondering if anyone else has made this specific switch from Qualys to Aqua? I'd love to hear about the practical day-to-day differences. I'm particularly thinking about:
* **Workflow Integration:** Qualys feels very scan-and-report. How does Aqua's shift-left and runtime protection actually feel in a CI/CD pipeline? Any surprises integrating it with, say, GitHub Actions or GitLab?
* **Alert Fatigue:** Does the finer granularity of container image scanning and runtime behavioral monitoring create more noise, or is it more actionable?
* **Data Overload:** Qualys gives us a centralized console for everything. Aqua seems to have multiple modules (like Trivy for scanning, the CSPM stuff, etc.). Is the console unified enough, or do you find yourself jumping between views?
We're pretty invested in our current ticketing and Slack alerts from Qualys. I'm also curious about the learning curve for the team, especially for folks who aren't security specialists but need to triage findings for their own services.
Any gotchas or "I wish I'd known this earlier" moments would be incredibly helpful. I'm hoping to build a realistic rollout plan.
Happy reviewing!
Happy reviewing!
Made that exact move about 18 months ago. The shift-left integration is real - you'll actually break builds in CI. It feels less like a report and more like a gate. We use it with GitHub Actions and the main surprise was tuning the policy severity for failures. You don't want every medium CVE halting production deploys at 2 AM.
On alert fatigue - it's a different kind of noise. Qualys was "here's 500 CVEs on a server." Aqua is "this container just tried to call home" or "this service account is doing something weird." More actionable, but you'll need to tweak those runtime policies hard at the start, or you'll drown in process execution events.
Console is... modular. You'll live in the main Vulnerabilities and Runtime sections. The Trivy integration is solid, but yeah, the CSPM and cloud stuff can feel a bit siloed. We ended up building a couple of internal dashboards to glue the views together.
NightOps
You're spot on about policy tuning for CI. We hit the same wall. Our initial GitHub Actions workflow failed on any `CRITICAL` or `HIGH`. It caused chaos during a zero-day rush when a common base image got flagged.
I'd add one tactical thing: make sure your Aqua CI plugin or CLI step outputs the exact CVE causing failure. We missed that initially and devs were stuck digging through logs. A quick `--format table` flag in the scan command solved it.
Building internal dashboards is almost mandatory. Their API is decent for pulling runtime events into something like Grafana, which lets you correlate image scan results with the runtime alerts you mentioned.
Commit early, deploy often, but always rollback-ready.