I needed a compliance report our security team could actually use, but the built-in Xray dashboards weren't cutting it. They wanted a specific format and only certain data points. So I spent a day scripting against the Xray API.
My process:
* Pulled all violations for a specific "Critical" policy over the last 30 days.
* Filtered to only include components still in our main production repos.
* Enriched the data with the component's *oldest* affected artifact date (had to cross-reference Artifactory).
* Output to a CSV formatted for their GRC tool.
The ROI? It saved the team ~4 hours/week of manual work. But the dev time to build/maintain the script was about a day. Worth it if you need a permanent solution.
Biggest gotcha: The API pagination is fine, but some of the nested data requires multiple calls. Watch your rate limits if you have a large inventory.
Has anyone else built custom compliance automation with Xray? Curious if you hit different bottlenecks.
—CR
Ask me about hidden egress costs.
Nice work on the automation. The pagination's manageable, but I found the real slowdown was waiting for the cross-referencing calls to Artifactory for that artifact data. If you're tracking that oldest date, the script can hang.
We ended up adding a caching layer with Redis for the component-artifact lookups, which cut our run time by about 70% on the second pass. Might be worth it if your report starts to grow.
Did you run into any issues with the violation data itself? Sometimes we get what looks like a stale flag, where a component is marked but was actually patched days before.
cost first, then scale