Practice : Vulnerability Management Dashboards

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Vulnerability Management Dashboards provide real-time visibility into known security risks across codebases, infrastructure, dependencies, and environments. They support proactive risk mitigation, compliance readiness, and prioritised remediation by consolidating actionable data into accessible, team-centric views.

By making vulnerabilities visible and understandable, these dashboards turn security into a shared responsibility - aligning engineers, operations, and security teams in defence of the organisation.

Description of the Practice

  • Dashboards aggregate vulnerability data from multiple scanners and sources (e.g. SAST, DAST, SCA, container scanning, CSPM).
  • Views are tailored by service, team, severity, exploitability, and exposure window.
  • Tools include GitHub Security Center, Sonatype, Snyk, Tenable, Qualys, Prisma Cloud, and custom Grafana/Power BI dashboards.
  • Dashboards drive prioritisation, reporting, and escalation workflows - ideally with integrations to issue trackers and alerting tools.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Inventory your security scanning tools and identify available data feeds or APIs.
  • Create an MVP dashboard focused on critical and exploitable vulnerabilities by repo, team, or environment.
  • Involve developers in reviewing findings - ensure output is relevant and understandable.
  • Define shared metrics such as “open critical vulnerabilities,” “mean time to remediate,” or “untriaged findings.”

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Expand dashboards to cover additional domains: infra, containers, IaC, APIs, etc.
  • Integrate with vulnerability SLAs, risk registers, and audit controls.
  • Provide tailored views for engineering teams, security champions, and leadership.
  • Automate prioritisation using context (e.g. usage, exposure, exploit availability).
  • Embed dashboard links in retros, standups, and delivery rituals to reinforce shared ownership.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Treat vulnerability data as essential telemetry - not as compliance noise.
  • Discuss open issues in planning and retrospectives, not just during fire drills.
  • Track and celebrate remediation progress to build momentum.
  • Use dashboards to enable self-service risk reduction.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Overwhelming dashboards with unactionable or noisy data.
  • Lack of ownership or clarity on remediation responsibilities.
  • Focusing only on counts, not on risk or user impact.
  • Dashboards becoming stale, unused, or untrusted.

5. Signals of Success

  • Vulnerabilities are triaged, prioritised, and remediated efficiently.
  • Teams proactively monitor and reduce their own risk exposure.
  • Security debt trends down over time, even as delivery scales.
  • Dashboards are regularly used in team rituals and decision-making.
  • Risk visibility enables meaningful discussions between engineering and leadership.