Okay, so we've been using Vanta for about eight months now to streamline our SOC 2 prep, and it's been a game-changer for evidence collection. But here's the thing that started to drive our engineering leads nuts: critical Vanta findings were getting lost in the shuffle of our weekly compliance check-ins. We needed those high-severity items to scream for attention, immediately, in the tools the team actually lives in.
That's why I built a lightweight integration that automatically creates PagerDuty incidents for high or critical severity findings in Vanta. It hooks into Vanta's webhooks (for new findings and status updates) and uses the PagerDuty API. Now, when a failing check pops up—like an insecure S3 bucket or an MFA gap—it triggers a PD incident assigned to our security engineering rotation. No more waiting for the weekly report, no more manual ticket creation.
The setup is pretty straightforward. I used a simple AWS Lambda (Node.js) as the webhook receiver to handle the payload and decide if it warrants a PagerDuty trigger. The logic filters on severity and status, so we're only paging on active, high-priority issues. It also adds a link back to the exact finding in Vanta in the PD incident description.
The result? Our mean time to acknowledge (and start fixing) critical config issues has dropped from days to literally minutes. It’s bridged that last-mile gap between “compliance tool finding” and “actionable engineering work item.” Has anyone else tried something similar? I’m curious how others are handling the alerting side of things, especially for smaller teams without a dedicated 24/7 security ops center.