I've been helping a few teams standardize their Delinea PAM audit reports, and there's a consistent point of friction: the complexity of the out-of-the-box SQL queries for the reporting database.
While the data schema is comprehensive, joining tables like `SecretActivityLog` with `Secret` and `Folder` to produce a simple report on who accessed what often requires navigating a surprising number of relationships and views. For instance, pulling a clean "failed access attempts by user with reason" report took more subqueries than I'd expect for a common compliance need. It feels like you need a deep understanding of the internal data model just to get started.
I appreciate that the system captures a lot of detail, but this creates a barrier for junior staff or auditors who just need to verify controls. The custom report builder in the UI helps, but for automated, recurring reports, we often fall back to SQL.
Is this just the nature of robust PAM audit data, or have others found workarounds? Has anyone built a simplified set of views or queries they're willing to share for common GRC use cases? I'm particularly interested in vendor risk review and access certification workflows.
—Avery (mod)
Review first, buy later.
Yes, that's a common pain point. It's not just PAM audit data, it's any enterprise system that evolved without a separate reporting schema.
My workaround is to treat the vendor's database as a raw source and build our own reporting layer in a separate database. Use something like dbt to materialize simplified views.
Example for "failed access attempts":
```sql
-- This is our simplified view. We refresh it daily from their tables.
CREATE VIEW pam_failed_access_summary AS
SELECT user_id, secret_name, timestamp, reason_code
FROM VendorSecretActivityLog
WHERE activity_type = 'FAILED_ACCESS'
-- joins and logic are already baked in here
```
Then the auditors query that view. It's an extra step, but it shields everyone from the underlying complexity. Also gives you control if the vendor changes their schema.
—cp
Oh, that's a classic problem, and I see it all the time with vendor reporting databases. They're built for the application's internal logic, not for human readability. What you're describing - needing deep knowledge for simple reports - is exactly why my team leans on an ELT pipeline.
We'd extract those raw tables into our own warehouse (BigQuery in our case) and then use dbt to build a clean, denormalized reporting layer specifically for auditors. You're basically creating a friendlier data model on top of theirs. That way, the "failed access attempts" query becomes a simple `SELECT * FROM report.failed_attempts` for your junior staff. It's an extra layer of work upfront, but it pays off every single reporting cycle.
Have you looked at whether Delinea exposes a cleaner API for this kind of audit data? Sometimes the API response is more structured for reporting use cases than the raw database is, and you can pipe that into your warehouse instead of wrestling with their SQL schema. Might be worth a shot.
ship it
Won't an API just give you a different flavor of the same headache? They often have rate limits and incomplete data. Check the fine print on what that "cleaner API" actually surfaces for compliance.
Building your own reporting layer sounds like paying for the vendor's design debt. Have you quantified the time and tooling cost of that ELT pipeline? It's not free.
Did you ask your Delinea rep why the schema is this way? They'll blame flexibility. Push them for the real cost of queries on their support tickets.
read the fine print
Agreed, creating a simplified view is a solid path. But that ELT pipeline you mentioned assumes a team has data engineering resources, which a lot of smaller security teams don't.
I'm curious, when you built that friendlier layer, did you find yourself needing to update it constantly whenever the vendor pushed a schema update? That maintenance overhead worries me.