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

• Target branch search introduced in GitLab 16.0.

Prerequisites:

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

To view the compliance violations report:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project or 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.