Snyk Essentials

Snyk Essentials helps AppSec teams better operationalize and scale the use of Snyk with broad application visibility and security coverage management.

Overview

Snyk Essentials enables:

• Automated app asset discovery: Continually discover application assets and classify them by business context, ensuring security is in sync with development.

• Tailored security controls: Define and manage appropriate security and compliance requirements, and verify that the correct controls are in place.

• Risk-based prioritization: Assess risk for each app based on application context and best-in-class security analysis and fix guidance to focus developer remediation efforts on issues that matter most to the business.

The following video shows the capabilities of Snyk Essentials.

Snyk Essentials core capabilities overview

Features

Snyk Essentials includes the following features:

• Integrations to support ingesting data from SCM tools for asset discovery, Snyk Application Security Testing products for security controls coverage, and ticketing or notification tools for policy actions. Use the Integration page to add and set up new integrations.

• Policies to classify and tag assets with business context and configure actions using a Policy Builder UI.

• Inventory layouts for managing assets and viewing Snyk coverage.

• A dashboard to view, add, and customize widgets.

Prerequisites

• You are a Snyk Enterprise customer.

• You have the necessary permissions to onboard cloud-based SCM tools (Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, and so on) to Snyk Essentials for repository asset discovery.

When you integrate a Git code repository with Snyk Essentials, you should use a secondary token with a broad, complete view of the code repository, not only of what you imported into Snyk.

Use a secondary token to countercheck everything onboarded using Snyk.

Using the secondary token reduces the likelihood of introducing a blind spot from a limited token at the Organization level configuration.

The first import synchronization can take up to 24 hours to complete.

Permissions

Snyk Essentials is included in the Snyk Enterprise plan. For more information on default user roles and permissions, see Default user roles.

Login and authentication

Log in and authenticate to Snyk using existing mechanisms (SSO, Google SAML, and so on).

Key concepts

Asset

A Snyk Essentials asset is an identifiable entity that is part of an application, and relevant for security and developers. Snyk is generally focused on the development stages of application software, secures repository assets containing software package assets, and builds artifacts like container image assets.

Controls

The security controls associated with the asset. Navigate to the Coverage controls section to see all available statuses for security controls.

Coverage

An assessment of whether applicable assets are scanned and tested by security tools (for example, Snyk Open Source), as it relates to an application security program. It represents a type of policy that allows you to specify what controls should be applied and, optionally, how often it needs to be run.

Tags

A way to categorize assets. Helps you recognize or handle assets differently according to mutual properties. Assets can be filtered by their tags in the inventory or when creating policy rules. A tag can be automatically assigned to an asset, or the asset can be tagged by a policy you created. GitHub and GitLab topics are treated as asset tags, and you can use them to create policies.

Class

A way to assign business context to assets and categorize an asset based on the business criticality. Assets can be assigned Classes A, B, C, or D, where Class A (assets that are business critical, deal with sensitive data, subject to compliance, and so on) is the most important and Class D (test apps, sandbox environments, and so on) the least important. Assets are assigned Class C by default. A class can be used in policies as well as defined in a policy.

Policy

A way to automate actions in certain conditions, like classifying and tagging assets with business context. You can also use a policy to configure actions like sending a message or setting the coverage gap control using a Policy builder UI.

Scanning methods

You can initiate a scan from the Web UI, the CLI, the API, or with PR Checks. See Start scanning for more details.

If you initiate your scans using the CLI, you can encounter one of the following situations:

• If you have a .git folder available in the directory that the CLI is scanning, then the git remoteurl is picked up automatically for Snyk Open Source, Snyk Code, Snyk Container, and Snyk IaC.

• If you do not have a .git folder available in the directory that the CLI is scanning, you can use different test or monitor commands to achieve the same result:

  • snyk monitor - for Snyk Open Source with the --remote-repo-url command

  • snyk iac test - also requires the --report and --remote-repo-url command

  • snyk container monitor - no options available

  • snyk code test - requires the --report and --remote-repo-url command