Just finished a compliance dashboard project using Sysdig Secure and Grafana, and it's been a game-changer for our audit readiness. We're a multi-cloud shop (AWS, GCP) and needed a single pane of glass for compliance across all of it.
We used Sysdig's out-of-the-box compliance policies (like CIS benchmarks) as our data source. The magic is piping those findings into a custom Grafana dashboard. Now we have real-time visualizations of our posture, drill-downs into failing resources, and trend lines that show improvement (or regression) over time. It's made our weekly security syncs so much more productive. The Grafana integration is super flexible – we could tailor the views for engineers vs. auditors. Highly recommend this combo if you're on the Sysdig platform! 🚀
measure twice, ship once
That's a solid approach. The flexibility you mentioned for different audiences is key; we've found engineering teams respond much better to dashboards focused on resource ownership and remediation steps, while compliance teams need the executive summary with clear pass/fail percentages.
One caveat on the real-time aspect: there's usually a data pipeline latency depending on how you've configured the export from Sysdig to your metrics backend (like Prometheus). We had to tune our polling intervals because the default compliance scans aren't truly continuous; they run on schedules. This caused some confusion initially when a fix didn't immediately reflect.
Could you share how you're handling the historical data for those trend lines? We ended up pushing the findings into a time-series database ourselves to get full retention control, as the native integration mostly offered a rolling window.
CPU cycles matter
The single pane of glass is key, but how are you handling scale? We tried this and the volume of findings became unmanageable in Grafana alone.
We had to dump the raw findings into ClickHouse and run aggregations there before Grafana queries. Grafana's query engine choked on a few hundred thousand time-series points.
What's your average finding count per scan? If you're above 50k, I'd be curious about your performance.
Numbers don't lie.
Yeah, scale is the big gotcha, isn't it? We hit a similar wall pushing everything directly to Prometheus/Grafana.
We ended up using the Sysdig API to first dump findings into S3 as JSON, then run a daily aggregation job (Lambda) that rolls up counts by policy and severity. Grafana only queries the aggregated metrics, not the raw findings. Our scan is ~30k findings, but the dashboard only shows ~50 time series points per panel.
That ClickHouse route sounds smart for real-time aggregation though. Did you keep the raw data there too, or just the roll-ups?
git push and pray
We hit the same wall. Our scans were averaging 70-80k findings, and direct Grafana queries on that volume were unusable.
We kept the raw data in ClickHouse for drill-down queries, but the dashboard itself only queries aggregated, pre-computed metrics stored in a separate table. The aggregation runs as a ClickHouse materialized view every 15 minutes, so we get near-real-time without the query cost. Grafana panels typically fetch less than 100 series now.
The key was decoupling storage for analytics from storage for visualization. Sysdig's API feed goes to ClickHouse, everything gets rolled up there, then Grafana pulls the small stuff.
shift left or go home
Yeah, the S3 dump approach makes a lot of sense to manage the load. I'm just starting with this kind of setup, so I have to ask: do you run into any issues with the JSON schema changing when Sysdig updates their API? That's my big fear, that a dashboard just breaks one day.
Also, daily aggregation seems smart for audit reports, but what about catching regressions sooner? Do you feel the day-long gap is okay, or are you thinking of moving that Lambda to run more often?