Compliance

  • Tier: Ultimate
  • Offering: GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, GitLab Dedicated

GitLab compliance features ensure your GitLab group meets common compliance standards, and are available at various pricing tiers. For more information about compliance management, see the compliance management solutions page.

The security features in GitLab may also help you meet relevant compliance standards.

For more information on all GitLab compliance features to ensure your GitLab instance meets common compliance standards, see Compliance features.

Compliant workflow automation

It is important for compliance teams to be confident that their controls and requirements are set up correctly, but also that they stay set up correctly. One way of doing this is manually checking settings periodically, but this is error prone and time consuming. A better approach is to use single-source-of-truth settings and automation to ensure that whatever a compliance team has configured, stays configured and working correctly. These features can help you automate compliance:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Compliance frameworks dotted-circle No check-circle Yes dotted-circle No Describe the type of compliance requirements projects must follow.
Compliance pipelines dotted-circle No check-circle Yes dotted-circle No Define a pipeline configuration to run for any projects with a given compliance framework.
Merge request approval policy approval settings check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Enforce a merge request approval policy enforcing multiple approvers and override various project settings in all enforced groups or projects across your GitLab instance or group.

Audit management

An important part of any compliance program is being able to go back and understand what happened, when it happened, and who was responsible. You can use this in audit situations as well as for understanding the root cause of issues when they occur.

It is helpful to have both low-level, raw lists of audit data as well as high-level, summary lists of audit data. Between these two, compliance teams can quickly identify if problems exist and then drill down into the specifics of those issues. These features can help provide visibility into GitLab and audit what is happening:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Audit events check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes To maintain the integrity of your code, audit events give administrators the ability to view any modifications made in the GitLab server in an advanced audit events system, so you can control, analyze, and track every change.
Audit reports check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Create and access reports based on the audit events that have occurred. Use pre-built GitLab reports or the API to build your own.
Audit event streaming check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Stream GitLab audit events to a HTTP endpoint or third party service, such as AWS S3 or GCP Logging.
Compliance center dotted-circle No check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Quickly get visibility into the compliance posture of your organization through compliance standards adherence reporting and violations reports. Manage your groups compliance frameworks centrally.

Policy management

Organizations have unique policy requirements, either due to organizational standards or mandates from regulatory bodies. The following features help you define rules and policies to adhere to workflow requirements, separation of duties, and secure supply chain best practices:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Granular user roles
and flexible permissions
check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Manage access and permissions with five different user roles and settings for external users. Set permissions according to people’s role, rather than either read or write access to a repository. Don’t share the source code with people that only need access to the issue tracker.
Merge request approvals check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Configure approvals required for merge requests.
Push rules check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Control pushes to your repositories.
Separation of duties using
protected branches and
custom CI/CD configuration paths
dotted-circle No dotted-circle No check-circle Yes Leverage the GitLab cross-project YAML configurations to define deployers of code and developers of code. See how to use this setup to define these roles in the Separation of Duties deploy project and the Separation of Duties project.
Security policies check-circle Yes check-circle Yes check-circle Yes Configure customizable policies that require merge request approval based on policy rules, or enforce security scanners to execute in project pipelines for compliance requirements. Policies can be enforced granularly against specific projects, or all projects in a group or subgroup.

Other compliance features

These features can also help with compliance requirements:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
External Status Checks dotted-circle No dotted-circle No check-circle Yes Interface with third-party systems you already use during development to ensure you remain compliant.
License approval policies dotted-circle No dotted-circle No check-circle Yes Search dependencies for their licenses. This lets you determine if the licenses of your project’s dependencies are compatible with your project’s license.
Lock project membership to group dotted-circle No check-circle Yes dotted-circle No Group owners can prevent new members from being added to projects in a group.