You can’t improve what you don’t measure—but let’s be honest, most security metrics are garbage. Pie charts that look pretty but say nothing. Dashboards that track “critical findings” without context. Reports designed to impress the board, not help devs. The right security metrics should help teams ship faster and safer. This section cuts through the fluff and focuses on numbers that drive real improvement—like how clean your code is, how fast you're fixing issues, and whether your tools are helping or just screaming into the void.

Placeholder image: Image description: Developer-friendly dashboard with four widgets—vulnerability density trend, scan coverage percentage, false positive rate, and MTTR bar graph—each linked to code repos or pipelines.

Vulnerability Density: How Clean Is Your Code, Really?

Vulnerability density tracks how many real, exploitable security issues show up per thousand lines of code (KLOC). This tells you more than “number of bugs”—it shows how risky your codebase is getting over time. If your team’s shipping twice as much code but vulns are flat? That’s progress. Use this to flag hotspots, compare teams, and prioritize reviews where they’re needed most.

Scan Coverage: Are You Looking in All the Right Places?

If you’re only scanning one repo or skipping IaC, you're flying blind. Scan coverage tells you what percentage of your stack is actually being checked—code, containers, secrets, dependencies, infra. Aikido makes this easy by showing coverage across tools in one place. No more wondering, “Did we scan that Terraform file?” You’ll know.

False Positive Rates: Is Your Tool Crying Wolf?

Alert fatigue kills adoption. If devs don’t trust the results, they stop looking at them. Track how many findings get closed as “not an issue” and look for patterns. If 70% of your “critical” alerts are garbage, the scanner isn’t helping—it’s hurting. Aikido cuts through this by showing only what’s exploitable, reachable, and relevant to your code.

Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) Revisited: The Ultimate Test of Your Process

MTTR isn’t just a security metric—it’s a process metric. How long does it take your team to fix a real vuln from detection to patch? Long MTTR means friction. Short MTTR means your pipeline works. Track it by repo, team, or severity. Celebrate when it drops. Fix blockers when it spikes. MTTR is the heartbeat of secure development at scale.

Insight: The right metrics don’t just help you pass an audit—they help your team ship better code, faster, and with fewer surprises. Let’s wrap it up with how to keep improving without chasing some mythical “perfect” security posture.