"Even before a commit gets to GitHub, the CLI identifies secrets within the code and prevents the commit"

We are using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring on our GitHub Enterprise repositories to make sure that our developers are not introducing any secrets into the code. Those secrets could be things like database passwords, connection strings, or AWS credentials. We use it when they commit code to our GitHub internal repositories.

We want to make sure that none of our secrets get committed and GitGuardian is doing a great job identifying them. It has the ability to scan our repositories and identify older commits that have secrets, meaning in code that was committed even four or five years ago, and that has gone unnoticed until we implemented GitGuardian.

We mainly depend on its ability to identify secrets and we also use the entire workflow of secrets management. That means we're able not only to identify secrets, but we can reach out to the owners of those repositories by opening up an incident ticket within GitGuardian. It actually creates an incident ticket for us. We can now go end-to-end after a secret has been identified, to track down who owns the repository and who is responsible for cleaning it up. We can also monitor what actions they are taking, such as revoking the secrets and ultimately closing out an incident, making sure that commit no longer has any secrets.

I would like to see more fine-grained access controls when tickets are assigned for incidents. I would like the ability to provide more controls to the team leads or the product managers so that they can drive what we, the AppSec team, are doing. They should have the ability to close out tickets and we would review them. 

I have been using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for almost two years.

Very rarely does GitGuardian go down or the monitoring fail or we have issues with the APIs. It's available 95 percent of the time. There have been a few times when we were notified that the service would be down because of maintenance. Like with any product, there are maintenance windows, which are not a problem. But I don't recall more than one or two instances of the internal monitoring not being available when we expected it to be.

We have a lot of repositories and we have not had a problem with GitGuardian monitoring all of them and doing what it is supposed to do. Deploying it at scale is pretty much seamless. You don't have to do anything special once you have onboarded it. GitGuardian has the ability to scan all the repositories in your GitHub Enterprise account, if that is what you choose to do. 

We have contacted their support about a few enhancements. In addition, we came across a couple of UI bugs where the stylesheet didn't render properly and the information we were looking for was overlapped by some other UI elements. But they were very quick fixes. 

To start using GitGuardian there is some groundwork that needs to be done. You start off with a few repositories and do a trial to get an understanding of how the UI works. You have to give permissions to GitGuardian to access your internal depositories and then organize the repositories around team structure. Those are the housekeeping tasks that need to be done to onboard with GitGuardian.

We looked at a few other solutions before we started to work with GitGuardian and what we found was that it provides the best solution for secrets management. We have a few other products that we use within our systems, products that also provide secrets management, but they don't come anywhere close to GitGuardian's ability to detect secrets, track them, and ultimately, get rid of them. GitGuardian is the leader in this space. Many times, what we identify in GitGuardian is not identified by those products.

I would tell a security colleague, using an open-source secrets detection solution at another company, to take a good look at GitGuardian. It definitely helps not only manage secrets but also the entire workflow around secrets management, from detection to remediation. It helps put best practices in place. It would save them quite a bit of time, rather than using an open-source solution. Open source is okay for some features, but you don't have all the tools you need for full-blown secrets management in the organization. That's what you get when you use GitGuardian.