Assets (Pro)

Organizations → ASSETS → Engagements → Tests → Findings

Overview#

Assets sit at the center of how security work is organized within DefectDojo’s object hierarchy. Assets represent any project, program, software, or physical asset that your security team is testing, and host all of the security work and testing history related to the testing goal. Examples of Assets can include:

• Software releases
• Third-party software
• Virtual machines or assets in production
• A single application
• A microservice
• An API
• A SaaS platform
• A mobile app
• An internal system
• A business service
• A customer-facing platform
• A cloud environment or infrastructure domain

In general, an Asset should represent the “thing” whose security posture you want to track over time. This includes the associated testing history, Findings, metrics, ownership, integrations, and remediation workflows related to that “thing.”

Asset Examples#

Assets can become even more granular depending on the needs of your organization. For example, you may consider creating separate DefectDojo Assets in the following scenarios:

• “ExampleAsset” has a Windows version, a Mac version, and a Cloud version
• “ExampleAsset 1.0” uses completely different software components from “ExampleAsset 2.0”, and both versions are actively supported by your company.
• The team assigned to work on “ExampleAsset version A” is different from the Asset team assigned to work on “ExampleAsset version B”, and needs to have different security permissions assigned as a result.

While you may also elect to represent these variations as Engagements within a single Asset, RBAC can only be set at the level of Assets or Organizations, which may limit users’ access to the appropriate Engagement (as well as the Tests and Findings within those Engagements) if they’re organized as such. For more information on RBAC and permissions in DefectDojo, click here.

Asset Data#

Assets will always include the following components:

• Organization
• Unique name
• Description
• SLA Configuration
• Prioritization Engine

Optional Asset metadata includes:

• Tags
• Business criticality
• User records (i.e., the estimated number of user records in the Asset)
• Revenue
• Personnel information (e.g., Asset Manager, Team Manager, Technical Contact, etc.)
• Regulations (e.g., HIPAA, GLBA, OPPA, etc.)
• Platform (e.g., API, Desktop, IoT, Mobile, Web, etc.)
• Lifecycle (e.g., Construction, Production, Retirement, etc.)
• Origin (e.g., Third-Party Library, Purchased, Open Source, etc.)

This metadata improves filtering, reporting, and prioritization across your security program, but most importantly, Assets also contain all of the Engagements, Tests, and Findings related to the testing efforts surrounding that Asset. All Findings from Tests ultimately roll up to the Asset level, enabling long-term tracking, trend analysis, and reporting.

Accessing Assets#

Assets are accessible via the sidebar. The submenu provides access to the Asset Hierarchy and All Assets, as well as the option to create a new Asset.

Permissions#

Assets can have Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) rules applied, which limit team members’ ability to view and interact with them.

Permissions cascade downward, meaning that access to an Asset automatically grants access to all objects within that Asset (e.g., Engagements, Tests, and Findings).

For more information on user roles, see our Introduction To Roles article.

Asset View#

Asset views contain a variety of tables and charts to interpret an Asset’s status at a glance. This includes:

• Open Finding Severity
  • A list of open Findings within the Asset, grouped by severity
• Asset Overview
  • A breakdown of various features of the Asset, including Description, Components, Contacts, User Groups, Members, Technologies, and Regulations.
    • Technologies: next.js, vue.js, npm v.1.2.3, Django, nginx, Hugo
• Metadata
  • Including parent and child Assets, Organization, business criticality, revenue, and other details added from the Asset’s settings.
• Service Level Agreement by Severity
  • Applies the Asset’s SLA configuration from settings to the Findings within the Asset.
• Finding Severity Breakdown
  • A graph of the Findings within the Asset, organized by severity.
• Finding Distribution
  • A breakdown of the Findings within the Asset, organized by status (e.g., Active, Mitigated, Static, and Dynamic)
• All Engagements
  • A list of Engagements contained within the Asset.

Working with Assets#

Create Assets#

There are two ways to create Assets:

• From the New Asset option in the side menu
• From the New Asset button at the top of the All Assets list

Edit Assets#

Assets can be edited by clicking Edit Asset from within the gear menu at the top right of the Asset’s view. The same menu can also be accessed by clicking the ⋮ kebab menu to the left of the Asset in the All Assets view.

All ensuing fields that can be edited are also available when the Asset is being created.

Export the Asset Inventory#

The All Assets list can be exported from the dropdown menu in the top-right corner, as CSV, Excel or JSON. The All Organizations list exports the same way.

The export contains the Assets the list is currently showing, so any filter or search you have applied narrows what you get. You choose which columns to include and the order they appear in, and you can name the file before it downloads.

Alongside the identifying fields, the export carries the metadata that drives prioritization — business criticality, user records, revenue, external audience, internet accessible — together with platform, lifecycle, origin and the parent Asset. That makes an export a practical way to review the inventory in a spreadsheet, and to fill in the business context that only your team knows before bringing it back into DefectDojo.

Values are written so a spreadsheet displays them rather than evaluating them. A cell that begins with =, +, - or @ is treated as a formula by Excel, LibreOffice and Google Sheets, so DefectDojo prefixes such a value with an apostrophe when it writes the file. Numbers are left alone, so a revenue column still adds up.

Delete Assets#

Deleting an Asset can be performed by selecting Delete Asset from the Asset’s settings. This action can’t be undone. Assets can’t be closed and reopened later.

Deleting an Asset will also delete the following:

• Any Engagements and Tests contained within the Asset
• All associated security history, including Findings and integrations
• Any linked Jira Epics
• All notes and file uploads associated with the Asset’s Engagements and Tests

Asset Boundaries#

Deduplication#

Assets are “walled-off” and do not interact with other Assets. DefectDojo’s Smart Features, such as Deduplication, only apply within the context of a single Asset. Findings across different Assets will not be automatically deduplicated.

Reporting and Metrics#

Most reporting and metrics aggregate data at the Asset level, making Assets the primary unit for measuring and tracking risk.

As a result, many key metrics are calculated per Asset, including:

• Total number of Findings (by severity or status)
• Mean time to remediate (MTTR)
• SLA compliance and breach rates
• Risk trends over time

This means that how Assets are structured will directly impact the accuracy and usefulness of reports. For example, grouping multiple unrelated systems under a single Asset may obscure risk visibility, while overly granular Asset structures can fragment reporting, making it difficult to identify broader trends.

Connectors#

In DefectDojo Pro, Connectors are mapped to different Assets in DefectDojo Pro, making them the primary integration point between DefectDojo and your broader security ecosystem.

Once a Connector has been attached to an Asset, it will import scan results and create or update Engagements, Tests, and Findings within that Asset.

For more information about Connectors, click here.

CI/CD Pipelines#

CI/CD pipelines automate the import of scan results. Regardless of the integration method, all scan imports must be associated with an Asset, making the Asset the anchor point for pipeline-driven security data.

When a pipeline submits scan results, it must either:

• Specify an existing Asset (and optionally an Engagement), or
• Be configured in a way that consistently maps results to the correct Asset

All imported Findings will inherit the Asset’s context, including ownership, permissions, priority/risk configuration, and reporting scope.

In practice, Assets should be defined to reflect how systems are built and deployed within CI/CD to ensure that security results are consistently associated with the correct application or service.

SLAs, Priority, and Risk#

In DefectDojo Pro, Findings inherit their SLA targets, Priority, and Risk from the Asset that contains them. Asset metadata (e.g., business criticality, revenue, etc.) are used to automatically calculate Priority and Risk values.

This means that the same vulnerability may receive a different Priority or Risk score depending on whether it affects an internal development system or a production asset supporting critical business operations.

Jira / Downstream Connector Relationships#

Assets can be mapped directly to Jira or Integrators instances (e.g. GitHub, GitLab, ServiceNow, etc.), which push the Asset’s Findings outward into external ticketing/work-management systems.

Because Findings inherit risk, priority, and ownership from their parent Asset, the Asset effectively determines the remediation context that flows into Jira tickets and Downstream Connector workflows.

Importantly, Assets are also the primary determining factor in a Finding’s SLA characteristics. Therefore, the SLA of a Findings depends on the SLA configuration of its parent Asset. More information about SLA configurations can be found here.

Asset Kinds#

An Asset can declare what kind of thing it is: a repository, a service, a host, a domain, a container image, a package, a cloud account, a device, or a branch. The kind is optional — an Asset without one behaves exactly as it always has — and it is descriptive rather than functional: it does not change permissions, deduplication, SLAs, or reporting scope. What it does is make a long Asset list readable, by giving each Asset an icon and a label that says what you are looking at.

The list of kinds is data, not a fixed set. The kinds DefectDojo ships are marked as system kinds and cannot be deleted, but their wording and icons can be changed, and you can add your own kinds for anything your inventory contains that the shipped list does not cover.

Kinds are available on the Asset itself and through the API at /api/v2/asset_kinds/ (read-only) and as the kind field on /api/v2/assets/.

Asset Identity: Aliases#

The same Asset is usually known by different names in different places: a repository id in GitHub, a project key in your scanner, a hostname in DNS, an image digest in a registry. An alias records one of those identifiers against the Asset it refers to, so DefectDojo can recognise the Asset from whichever name a source happens to use.

Each alias has three parts:

• a namespace, naming the system that issued the identifier — dns, oci, purl, git, or a specific Connector configuration;
• a type, saying what kind of identifier it is — external_id, hostname, image_digest, and so on;
• the value itself.

An identifier resolves to exactly one Asset. Two Assets cannot both claim api.example.com in the dns namespace, which is what makes an alias a reliable answer to “which Asset is this?”

Aliases record where they came from. Ones you add yourself are marked as user-asserted and are never rewritten by automation; Connector sync maintains its own. That means you can correct a Connector’s idea of what an identifier means without the next sync undoing it.

Aliases are asserted or withdrawn, never edited: there is no update action on the API, because changing an identifier in place would silently re-point identity with no record of what it used to mean. To correct one, remove it and add the right one.

Connector-issued aliases are written by Connector sync rather than by hand, so the API refuses writes to a connector: namespace. Everything else is yours to declare, through /api/v2/asset_aliases/.

Aliases require DD_V3_ASSET_ALIASES to be enabled before they can be created; existing ones stay readable whether it is on or off.

Asset Nesting#

DefectDojo supports parent-child relationship between two Assets within the same Organization. This can be configured during Asset creation or in the Asset’s settings.

You can visualize the structure of Assets in DefectDojo and change relationships using the Asset Hierarchy option in the sidebar.

After selecting the Assets to be visualized from the corresponding table, click View Asset Hierarchy to generate a flow chart of the relationship between the chosen Assets, if any.

Further information on the effect of nesting Assets on deduplication, RBAC, and other details, as well as example use cases, can be found here.