Compliance violations report

DETAILS: Tier: Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

• Renamed to compliance violations report in GitLab 15.9.
• Ability to create and edit compliance frameworks introduced in GitLab 16.0.

With the compliance violations report, you can see a high-level view of merge request activity for all projects in the group.

When you select a row in the compliance violations report, a drawer appears that provides:

• The project name and compliance framework label, if the project has one assigned.
• A link to the merge request that introduced the violation.
• The merge request's branch path in the format [source] into [target].
• A list of users that committed changes to the merge request.
• A list of users that commented on the merge request.
• A list of users that approved the merge request.
• The user that merged the merge request.

View the compliance violations report for a group

• Target branch search introduced in GitLab 16.0.

Prerequisites:

• You must be an administrator or have the Owner role for the group.

To view the compliance violations report:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your group.
2. Select Secure > Compliance center.

You can sort the compliance report on:

• Severity level.
• Type of violation.
• Merge request title.

You can filter the compliance violations report on:

• The project that the violation was found on.
• The date range of violation.
• The target branch of the violation.

Select a row to see details of the compliance violation.

Severity levels

Each compliance violation has one of the following severities.

Icon	Severity level
{severity-critical}	Critical
{severity-high}	High
{severity-medium}	Medium
{severity-low}	Low
{severity-info}	Info

Violation types

From GitLab 14.10, these are the available compliance violations.

Violation	Severity level	Category	Description
Author approved merge request	High	Separation of duties	Author of the merge request approved their own merge request. For more information, see Prevent approval by author.
Committers approved merge request	High	Separation of duties	Committers of the merge request approved the merge request they contributed to. For more information, see Prevent approvals by users who add commits.
Fewer than two approvals	High	Separation of duties	Merge request was merged with fewer than two approvals. For more information, see Merge request approval rules.

Separation of duties

GitLab supports a separation of duties policy between users who create and approve merge requests. Our criteria for the separation of duties is:

• A merge request author is not allowed to approve their merge request.
• A merge request committer is not allowed to approve a merge request they have added commits to.
• The minimum number of approvals required to merge a merge request is at least two.

Export a report of merge request compliance violations on projects in a group

• Introduced in GitLab 16.4 with a flag named compliance_violation_csv_export. Disabled by default.
• Enabled on GitLab.com and self-managed in GitLab 16.5.
• Feature flag compliance_violation_csv_export removed in GitLab 16.9.

Export a report of merge request compliance violations on merge requests belonging to projects in a group. Reports:

• Do not use filters on the violations report.
• Are truncated at 15 MB so the email attachment is not too large.

Prerequisites:

• You must be an administrator or have the Owner role for the group.

To export a report of merge request compliance violations for projects in a group:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your group.
2. Select Secure > Compliance center.
3. In the top-right corner, select Export.
4. Select Export violations report.

A report is compiled and delivered to your email inbox as an attachment.

Chain of Custody report

• Introduced in GitLab 13.3.
• Chain of Custody reports sent using email introduced in GitLab 15.3 with a flag named async_chain_of_custody_report. Disabled by default.
• Generally available in GitLab 15.5. Feature flag async_chain_of_custody_report removed.
• Chain of Custody report includes all commits (instead of just merge commits) introduced in GitLab 15.9 with a flag named all_commits_compliance_report. Disabled by default.
• Generally available in GitLab 15.9. Feature flag all_commits_compliance_report removed.

The Chain of Custody report provides a 1 month trailing window of all commits to a project under the group.

To generate the report for all commits, GitLab:

1. Fetches all projects under the group.
2. For each project, fetches the last 1 month of commits. Each project is capped at 1024 commits. If there are more than 1024 commits in the 1-month window, they are truncated.
3. Writes the commits to a CSV file. The file is truncated at 15 MB because the report is emailed as an attachment (GitLab 15.5 and later).

The report includes:

• Commit SHA.
• Commit author.
• Committer.
• Date committed.
• Group.
• Project.

If the commit has a related merge commit, then the following are also included:

• Merge commit SHA.
• Merge request ID.
• User who merged the merge request.
• Merge date.
• Pipeline ID.
• Merge request approvers.

Generate Chain of Custody report

To generate the Chain of Custody report:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your group.
2. Select Secure > Compliance center.
3. In the top-right corner, select Export.
4. Select Export chain of custody report.

Depending on your version of GitLab, the Chain of Custody report is either sent through email or available for download.

Generate commit-specific Chain of Custody report

• Introduced in GitLab 13.6.
• Support for including all commits instead of only merge commits added in GitLab 15.10.

You can generate a commit-specific Chain of Custody report for a given commit SHA. This report provides only the details for the provided commit SHA.

To generate a commit-specific Chain of Custody report:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your group.
2. Select Secure > Compliance center.
3. In the top-right corner, select Export.
4. Select Export custody report of a specific commit.
5. Enter the commit SHA, and then select Export custody report.

Depending on your version of GitLab, the Chain of Custody report is either sent through email or available for download.

Alternatively, use a direct link: https://gitlab.com/groups/<group-name>/-/security/merge_commit_reports.csv?commit_sha={optional_commit_sha}, passing in an optional value to the commit_sha query parameter.