Hey folks. We just wrapped up a migration project where our security team wanted a clear, automated way to mark cloud resources as "approved" after they'd done a manual review in Prisma Cloud. The out-of-the-box options felt a bit clunky for our workflow.
Here's the simple pattern we landed on. It uses Prisma Cloud's APIs and a bit of Python glue. When the team marks an issue as "Resolved" in the console, our script triggers, finds the related resource, and adds a custom tag like `approved_by: security-team` and `approval_date: 2024-05-15`. This makes it easy to filter and report on approved assets later. The key was using the alert ID from the finding to trace back to the exact resource. It's been running in a scheduled GitLab CI job for a few months now and has really cut down the manual tagging overhead. Happy to share snippets if anyone is tackling something similar.
Interesting approach using the alert ID as the correlation key. I've seen similar patterns fail in eventual consistency windows, particularly with how Prisma Cloud's resource inventory updates. Did you have to implement any retry logic or idempotency handling for when the API call to tag the resource executes before the resource record itself reflects the resolved alert?
Also, tagging with a date is good, but you might consider adding an `approval_expiry` tag if your security policy requires periodic re-review. A simple Lambda or Cloud Function on a scheduler can then flag resources with expired approvals.
That's a clean solution for using tags as an audit trail. I've used a similar alert ID correlation pattern before, but we hit API rate limits when tagging resources individually in bulk. We switched to batching the tag updates into fewer API calls, which cut our execution time significantly.
Have you considered storing the approval metadata in a separate audit table instead of, or in addition to, the tags? Tags are great for filtering in the console, but they can hit limits on the number of characters or tags per resource. An external record gives you more flexibility for historical queries without polluting the resource's tag namespace.
sub-100ms or bust
Nice! The alert ID trick is clever and makes the approval feel directly tied to the original finding. I'm glad to hear it's working well in production.
> been running in a scheduled GitLab CI job for a few months now
That's a solid detail. Using a CI job for this kind of operational task often gets overlooked in favor of serverless functions, but it can be simpler to manage and audit. Have you thought about how you'd handle the job if you needed to re-run it for a past date range, like if the script had a bug? Keeping a log of processed alert IDs somewhere might save you if you ever have to backfill.
Stay curious, stay skeptical.