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This version of GitHub Enterprise Server was discontinued on 2023-09-25. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise Server. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

About security overview

You can gain insights into the overall security landscape of your organization and view summaries of alerts for repositories owned by your organization.

Who can use this feature

Security overview for an organization is available to all members of the organization. The views and data displayed are determined by your role in the organization, and by your permissions for individual repositories within the organization.

Security overview for an enterprise shows organization owners and security managers data for the organizations they have access to. Enterprise owners can only view data for organizations where they are added as an organization owner or security manager. For more information, see "Managing your role in an organization owned by your enterprise."

Security overview for your organization is available if you have a license for GitHub Advanced Security. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

About security overview

Security overview provides high-level summaries of the security landscape of an organization or enterprise and makes it easy to identify repositories that require intervention. You can also use security overview to see which repositories have enabled specific security features and to configure any available security features that are not currently in use.

Note: Security overview shows information and metrics for the default branches of an organization's repositories.

Security overview shows which security features are enabled for repositories and includes repository and alert-focused views so you can quickly investigate security issues and take action to remediate them.

  • Risk and coverage information about Dependabot features and alerts is shown for all repositories.
  • Risk and coverage information for GitHub Advanced Security features, such as code scanning and secret scanning, is shown for enterprises that use GitHub Advanced Security.

For more information, see "About Dependabot alerts" and "About GitHub Advanced Security."

The views are interactive with filters that allow you to look at the aggregated data in detail and identify sources of high risk or low feature coverage. As you apply multiple filters to focus on narrower areas of interest, all data and metrics across the view change to reflect your current selection. For more information, see "Filtering alerts in security overview."

There are also dedicated views for each type of security alert that you can use to limit your analysis to a specific set of alerts, and then narrow the results further with a range of filters specific to each view. For example, in the secret scanning alert view, you can use the "Secret type" filter to view only secret scanning alerts for a specific secret, like a GitHub personal access token.

Note: Security overview displays active alerts raised by security features. If there are no alerts shown in security overview for a repository, undetected security vulnerabilities or code errors may still exist or the feature may not be enabled for that repository.

About security overview for organizations

The application security team at your company can use the different views for both broad and specific analyses of your organization's security status. For example, they can use the overview page to monitor adoption of features by your organization or by a specific team as you roll out GitHub Advanced Security to your enterprise, or to review all alerts of a specific type and severity level across all repositories in your organization.

You can find security overview on the Security tab for any organization that's owned by an enterprise. Each view shows a summary of the data that you have access to. As you add filters, all data and metrics across the view change to reflect the repositories or alerts that you've selected. For information about permissions, see "Permission to view data in security overview."

Understanding the main security overview

Screenshot of security overview for an organization.

Each repository is shown in security overview with an indicator for each type of security feature and how many alerts there are of each type. If a security feature is not enabled for a repository, the indicator for that feature will be grayed out. In addition, a risk score is calculated for each repository based on its code scanning, Dependabot and secret scanning alerts. This score is in beta and should be used with caution. Its algorithm and approach is subject to change.

IndicatorMeaning
Code scanning alerts. For more information, see "About code scanning."
Secret scanning alerts. For more information, see "About secret scanning."
Dependabot alerts. For more information, see "About Dependabot alerts."
The security feature is enabled, but does not raise alerts in this repository.
The security feature is not supported in this repository.

About security overview for enterprises

You can find security overview on the Code Security tab for your enterprise. Each page displays aggregated and repository-specific security information for your enterprise. You can view repositories owned by your enterprise that have security alerts, view all security alerts, or view security feature-specific alerts from across your enterprise.

For information about permissions, see "Permission to view data in security overview."

About security overview for teams

You can find security overview on the Security tab for any team in an organization that's owned by an enterprise.

At the team level, security overview displays repository-specific security information for repositories that the team has admin privileges for. For more information, see "Managing team access to an organization repository."

Further reading