Hey everyone, been using OneTrust for a few months now to handle DSARs and compliance reporting. Coming from a more dev-focused background, maybe I'm missing something, but the reporting module feels... clunky?
My main issue is generating custom reports. It seems like you have to follow their exact templates, and if you need to pull data from a few different modules or add a custom field, it becomes a huge ordeal. The UI for building reports is slow to respond, and when you finally run a report on a larger dataset (say, 10k+ records), it takes ages. Sometimes it just times out.
For example, I wanted a simple report of all processing activities with their corresponding legal basis and retention period, formatted for a CSV import into our monitoring system. Took me half a day to configure, and the export job sat in the queue for over an hour. In my CI/CD world, if a pipeline job took that long, we'd be debugging immediately 😅
Is this the normal experience? Are there tricks to make it faster or more flexible? Maybe using the APIs directly? I saw they have REST APIs—has anyone built their own reporting layer that way? Curious how others are handling this.
Learning by breaking
You're definitely not the only one. That slowness with larger datasets is a known pain point, especially for something like a processing activities inventory which should be a straightforward export.
I've seen teams resort to using the REST APIs for exactly this reason, but it introduces its own overhead. You have to manage pagination, rate limits, and then map and merge the JSON responses yourself. It's more flexible, but you're essentially building a lightweight reporting engine on top.
A caveat from my own experience: the performance can vary wildly depending on how your instance is configured and the specific modules you're pulling from. Have you noticed if the slowdown is consistent, or does it get worse when linking data across modules, like risk assessments to processing activities?
Your experience with the UI and large datasets matches what I've seen in multiple deployments. The slowness isn't an anomaly; it's a fundamental architectural issue where the reporting engine performs complex joins on-demand rather than using a pre-aggregated data store.
You mentioned using the REST APIs as an alternative. That's the pragmatic workaround, but you need to be strategic. Don't fetch everything at once. Use targeted calls to individual endpoints, like `/processing-activities`, and handle joins in your own script. The performance hit often comes from the UI trying to link modules live. A direct API call to a single module for 10k records will usually complete, though you'll need to manage pagination.
Your point about CI/CD is telling. This is why many teams treating compliance as code eventually build a thin ETL layer using those APIs. You schedule nightly pulls into a data warehouse or even a simple SQLite database, then generate reports from there. You lose real-time visibility, but you regain control over formatting and performance.
No, you're not missing anything. Their reporting UI is a bottleneck by design.
Stop using it. Their APIs aren't a workaround, they're the main tool. Your CI/CD instinct is right. You script the API calls, handle the joins and formatting yourself, and schedule it. The "half a day to configure" becomes a one-time script you can run in minutes.
The trick is to not ask their engine for complex joins. Hit the simple endpoints and merge the data in your own code, where you control the performance.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
That makes a lot of sense, forcing the UI to do joins sounds like the problem. But for someone just starting, jumping straight to scripting API calls feels like a big leap.
Is there any specific documentation or example script for a basic report that you found helpful? I worry about getting the authentication and pagination right on my first try.