Alright, let’s pull up a chair and talk scanners. I’ve seen a few come and go over the years—remember running FindBugs through Jenkins jobs and crossing your fingers? 😅
So, Checkmarx. We ran it for about 18 months at my last gig (big retail, you’d know the name). The mandate came from the top: “Get us a SAST tool, now.” The security team picked Checkmarx, and we in DevOps had to make it run in the pipeline. Let me tell you, the initial integration was… an adventure. The damn thing needed its own dedicated VMs just for the engines, and the scans for our monorepo (a beast of a Java/Spring app with some frontend modules) would sometimes take 90 minutes. We had to get creative with incremental scanning and aggressive caching.
The real struggle wasn’t the runtime, though—it was the signal-to-noise ratio. Out of the box, it flooded us with issues. We spent weeks tuning the query bundles, writing custom filters to suppress things like “Hardcoded Password in String” on test files and internal configs. Once we got it dialed in, it did catch a few legit SQLi patterns and path traversals before they hit prod. But maintaining that tuning as the codebase evolved felt like a part-time job.
Here’s a snippet of the ignore rule config we ended up maintaining in YAML for the CxQL queries. It got… extensive.
```yaml
checkmarx_suppressions:
- query_id: "java.sql.SQLInjection"
filter: "file_path:.*/test/.*"
- query_id: "java.web.HttpResponseSplitting"
filter: "severity:Low AND line_count:1"
```
My two cents? It’s powerful, but it’s a beast to feed and tame. For a Fortune 500 with the budget for dedicated AppSec people to manage it, maybe. For a team trying to “shift left” without the headcount, it can drown you in work. I’m curious—has anyone else here wrestled it into a workable state, or did you move on to something else?
-- Dad
it worked on my machine
That point about the signal-to-noise ratio out of the box is critical. We had a similar rollout, and the volume of findings created immediate alert fatigue for developers, which is the worst possible outcome.
Our breakthrough was treating the initial configuration not as a one-time setup, but as its own continuous integration project. We version-controlled the entire Checkmarx project configuration - the query bundles, the filter scripts, the severity mappings - in Git alongside the app code. Any change to the scan profile went through a PR and review with leads from both security and the platform team. It turned maintenance from a chaotic, reactive task into a documented process.
Did you ever get pushback from the security team when you started writing custom filters? We had to spend a lot of time educating them that suppressing a false positive in a specific, documented test utility wasn't weakening our posture, it was strengthening the credibility of the remaining findings.
- Mike