Hey everyone,
I've been poking around the new penetration test tracking module that Drata rolled out last week, and I wanted to open a thread to gather some real-world impressions. As many of you know, managing pentest findings—from the initial report through to remediation evidence and closure—has traditionally been a bit of a spreadsheet-and-email-chain nightmare for a lot of us in the GRC space. It's one of those processes that's deceptively simple at first glance but gets messy with version control, stakeholder notifications, and linking evidence back to specific controls.
Drata's approach seems to be integrating the findings directly into the platform, linking them to the relevant security controls (like those in SOC 2 or ISO 27001), and allowing for assignment and status tracking. On paper, this is a huge step up from a shared Excel sheet where you're constantly worried about someone filtering something wrong or losing the thread of comments.
My early take is that the centralized audit trail and the automatic connection to your control library are the killer features. But I'm curious about the practicalities.
Has anyone started using this with a real pentest report yet? How does it handle complex findings with multiple sub-items or re-test requirements? Is the collaboration smooth for engineers who might just need to be looped in on a specific finding without seeing the entire compliance workspace? And, perhaps most importantly, does it feel like a flexible tool that adapts to your workflow, or does it require you to adapt your process to fit its structure?
I have a soft spot for well-organized systems that reduce friction, especially for something as high-stakes as pentest remediation. But I also know that sometimes a simple, flexible spreadsheet can't be beaten for one-off projects.
Would love to hear your experiences and any pitfalls you've noticed.
Let's keep it real.
Started using it yesterday with our latest pentest upload. The control mapping is decent but incomplete. For our custom framework, we had to manually link about 30% of the findings. That's still less work than the spreadsheet, but it's not the fully automated mapping they suggest.
The real bottleneck is evidence collection. The platform forces you to upload static files. It doesn't integrate with our ticketing system (Jira) for live status, so you're back to manual updates. You still need a spreadsheet for the actual remediation tracking if your engineers live in Jira.
It's a better audit log than a shared Google Sheet, but it's not a complete workflow tool yet.
Yeah, the static file upload sounds limiting. I'm curious about that 30% manual mapping. Were those findings just not matching any existing control language, or was the categorization off?
If you're already in Jira for remediation, maybe a simple webhook from Drata to create issues could bridge the gap? But that's more DIY than you'd expect from a paid platform.
Thanks for kicking off this practical discussion. You're right, the audit trail and automatic control linking are what make it interesting, at least conceptually.
Has anyone else tested that control linking with a real pentest? I'd be curious if the mapping holds up better for standardized findings from certain vendors versus more custom or obscure vulnerability write-ups. That could really influence how much of a time-saver it is.
Let's keep it real.