Workshop release notes

Announcements

• 📣 This is a hotfix release. It contains one performance fix for clean syncs.

Fixed

• ❗ Clean syncs are much faster on tenants with large rule sets, and no longer put heavy IO load on the database while a host downloads its rules.

Announcements

• 📣 This release promotes Tags as a first-class concept. There is now a top-level Tags section with per-tag settings, priority ordering, and per-tag process overrides.
• 📣 Time-based rules in CEL allow you to control when something is allowed to run
• 📣 Cross-event sequences in Signals, full-process tree uploads, and an improved process tree viewer

Fixed

• ❗ Rule sync no longer drops rules when a pagination boundary lands on a created_at tie.
• ❗ Clean sync no longer serves stale cached data for deleted rules.
• ❗ Approval workflows no longer fail forever for OS platform binaries.
• ❗ AI chat no longer stalls when Claude models exhaust the token budget by thinking.
• ❗ Table filters in URLs now properly handle CJK text and emoji.
• ❗ Fixed the Team ID row on the event details page for platform-ish binaries.
• ❗ Fixed ordering by tag on the hosts and directory groups tables.
• ❗ Package rules only delete materialized rules that have a valid ID.
• ❗ Rule pack teardown no longer deletes rules from other rule packs.
• ❗ Fixed issues with the Dangerous Entitlements report.
• ❗ Preflight now fails loudly when a host record update fails, instead of continuing silently.
• ❗ Last seen client mode is now stored correctly.
• ❗ Usernames are now stored and matched case-insensitively throughout, resolving occasional issues with approval workflows.
• ❗ Package rules no longer adopt or re-policy rules that already exist.
• ❗ Package rules with a very large number of identifiers can now be properly ingested.
• ❗ A batch of smaller UI fixes across the console.

Changed

• ↔️ Redesigned the dashboard, which prioritizes actionable information higher in the page
• ↔️ The nav bar is now sticky with a layered shadow and refreshed header, search, and chat buttons.
• ↔️ Revamped “Create Network Rule” modal.
• ↔️ Updated process tree visualization in signal matches.
• ↔️ Host details are now split into separate tabs.
• ↔️ Package rule details always show the binary and version selection expressions.
• ↔️ Tag names can now contain spaces.
• ↔️ Reports now read from aggregates, and recent apps no longer read raw events.
• ↔️ Documentation and API errors now list every valid MCP toolset slug.

Added

• ➕ Top-level Tags section with a tags list, tag detail pages, rename and delete actions, priority ordering, and managed settings counts.
• ➕ Edit tagged settings from each tag page, and edit host settings with the same editor.
• ➕ Per-tag process overrides.
• ➕ Bulk package import for Homebrew packages.
• ➕ Nix package scanning and Nix package rules.
• ➕ Time-based rules in CEL: policy_for_range(), now(), weekdays(), today(tz), and kill_on_expiry().
• ➕ Signals support sequence(), a full process tree flag, and an OS column.
• ➕ Telemetry query history.
• ➕ Export network flow events and host metrics to cloud storage.
• ➕ File access authorization now supports per-process options.
• ➕ Approve for Tag on designated approver requests.
• ➕ Directory groups list page, group membership filtering on directory users, and cost center and department sync from directory events.
• ➕ Vote counts on blockable details, with a reset button.
• ➕ The latest available Santa release is now shown in the console with a direct download link
• ➕ Tag selector on the fleet metrics report.
• ➕ WorkspaceONE in the MDM dropdown.
• ➕ An unsaved-changes guard on the telemetry query page.

Announcements

• 📣 This release mainlines the Ready for Lockdown report - bulk rule creation, CSV export, and app links - replacing the legacy report.
• 📣 Rule Packs can now contain all rule types and combine multiple rule types in a single pack
• 📣 Signals can now trigger on repeated events across a time window and upload a process tree slice from the trigger event
• 📣 We’ve added a package inventory command to upload telemetry data about all the packages on your machines across a variety of ecosystems. Along with this we’ve re-designed the commands interface to handle queuing and display of attempt history

Fixed

• ❗ Push notification values are no longer written into audit events.
• ❗ SETTINGS_AUTO_UPDATE audit events now record the correct details.
• ❗ The workshop-audit-user role now has all the expected read permissions.
• ❗ Spurious update-failure messages no longer appear on AWS deployments.
• ❗ Package rule sync errors are correctly reported as errors instead of successes.
• ❗ Slack block notifications now resolve the rule by the rule ID Santa reports to better handle replacements.
• ❗ Auto-update settings no longer flash the Disabled option while loading.
• ❗ Table filters correctly escape apostrophes, allowing querying for fields containing them.
• ❗ Telemetry results reset to the first page when a new query is run, avoiding misleading “no results found” errors.
• ❗ Scrolling inside a CEL editor no longer gets swallowed by the page.
• ❗ Rule pack catalog no longer shows “All rules edited” on every subscription, and empty subscriptions warn correctly.
• ❗ Multi-party approval on rule pack changes shows a proper prompt, and closing the approval modal no longer raises an error toast.
• ❗ The lockdown report labels the app hash as SHA-256 rather than CDHash.
• ❗ Voting emails are normalized to lowercase.
• ❗ Command palette and docs search include previously missing entries.
• ❗ Fixed a very rare rule sync issue that could cause a rule to be skipped if it was added during a period of high contention.
• ❗ Fixed Slack bot not alerting users that an approval cannot be requested due to a block rule or a binary being flagged.

Changed

• ↔️ Navigation replaced in-page tabs with a megamenu and sub-nav; tabs are now real URLs (?tab= query params are gone) and each page sets its own document title.
• ↔️ Audit moved from a top-level page into Settings.
• ↔️ Signal state colors were swapped and severity colors removed.
• ↔️ The FAA rule creation modal was redesigned with a live preview, and FAA rules auto-inject noisy system processes.
• ↔️ Rule packs are gated by release channel and minimum Workshop version; packs above your version show a version notice instead of an Add button, and unsubscribed pack titles link to their preview.
• ↔️ App icons are now shown in many places throughout the UI.
• ↔️ Telemetry queries run through DuckDB are restricted to SELECT-only.
• ↔️ Tag ordering scales to 5000 tags with a warning in the UI past 250.

Added

• ➕ Ready for Lockdown report: bulk rule creation, CSV export, shift-click range selection, and links from app names to app pages.
• ➕ Santa commands service with package inventory, binary upload, and kill commands, plus a commands UI and results view.
• ➕ AI chat shows tool calls and results on both live and historical conversations.
• ➕ QueryTelemetry is exposed as a streaming tool on MCP and AI chat.
• ➕ Per-connection MCP tool selection via X-MCP-* headers.
• ➕ Advanced CEL filters on package rules, with function autocompletion in the CEL editor.
• ➕ Signal rules support process trees and responsible process attribution.
• ➕ Signal and network flow rules can be delivered through rule packs.
• ➕ Risk engine setting to evaluate only unknown blocked executions.
• ➕ Local groups can now coexist with directory-synced groups.
• ➕ Auto-updates support per-day scheduling and display GMT times alongside local.
• ➕ Overwrite warnings when creating a rule that already exists.
• ➕ Support for customizing the “Open” button on a per-rule basis.
• ➕ Docs: the Complete Guide to CEL in Santa Rules, webhook documentation, sandbox profile documentation, and per-version badges.

Fixed

• ❗ Updated Next.js to 16.2.11 to fix several vulnerabilities

Announcements

• 📣 This release introduces several large new features: Signals, customizable detection rules with reports and labels, Network rules for controlling network flows, Rule Packs subscribe, preview, and safely apply curated rule sets, Temporary Admin Mode (beta) to remove latent admin access, a new Lockdown readiness report to guide your path to Lockdown, and a new Webhooks API lets you receive audit, approval, and signal events.

Fixed

• ❗ Number inputs that couldn’t be cleared can now be emptied
• ❗ Fixed high latency when voting to approve applications
• ❗ Scope regexes no longer stick across tags in the UI
• ❗ Approvals now return an audit failure when a user has zero eligible hosts
• ❗ Designated-approver emails are compared case-insensitively in approval workflows
• ❗ Numerous smaller UI/UX and correctness fixes across the app

Changed

• ↔️ Santa auth tabs are unified and sync tokens are now copyable
• ↔️ The telemetry filter bar now applies AND/OR per gap instead of globally
• ↔️ Seatbelt policies now use the BINARY_PATH placeholder
• ↔️ Block reason is now a checkbox, and policy names were clarified
• ↔️ Donut chart values are centered on the pie
• ↔️ Hosts not synced in over 30 days are now hidden in more places
• ↔️ FAA signing IDs are now sourced from the binary catalog and composed for platform binaries

Added

• ➕ Network rules: define network-flow rules, ingest network flow events, view them on a details page, with MPA gating
• ➕ Temporary Admin Mode (beta): grant time-boxed admin access, gated behind the EPM tenant feature
• ➕ Signals: detection rules with santasync download, report upload, labels, host-tag scoping, and a dedicated UI
• ➕ Lockdown readiness: new LockdownProgress reporting with projected per-mode host counts, rule-coverage attribution, and a Ready-for-Lockdown report UI.
• ➕ Rule Packs: subscribe to curated rule sets provided by North Pole Security with preview-before-apply and overwrite warnings
• ➕ Webhooks: receive webhooks for audit events, first-time software approvals, and signals
• ➕ AI Chat and MCP now benefit from an internal tool dispatcher, significantly reducing token usage and improving performance
• ➕ AI chat can now render Mermaid diagrams
• ➕ Telemetry query storage, save your queries for replay later, with descriptions and versioning
• ➕ Added autocompletion in the telemetry filter expression editor
• ➕ CEL rules now support today() and days() functions
• ➕ Added split silence modes for block policies - block just the GUI, just the TTY, or both
• ➕ A “Copy Event Details” button to most events
• ➕ Approval workflows in Slack can now be explicitly rejected
• ➕ Automatically upload bundle information for apps that are not yet known by Workshop and for which an allow event occurs
• ➕ Tables in the UI now show total counts up to 10k rows
• ➕ Improved API validation of requests and more consistent error responses

• 📣 Hotfix release. This is an out-of-band hotfix for v2026.5 addressing approval-workflow latency and raising the tag limit.

Added

• ➕ Increased the tag limit to 250. (Hosts remain capped at 25 active tags.)

Fixed

• ❗ Resolved latency issues in the approval workflow voting path.

Announcements

• 📣 Seatbelt Policies

Initial support for Seatbelt rules, including a built-in editor for authoring and syncing rules and a simple builder to help build initial policies. The minimum required Santa version for Seatbelt rules is 2026.4.

• 📣 MPA Everywhere

Multi-Party Approval can now be attached to any mutating API method via a generic interceptor, rather than a fixed set of endpoints. CEL expressions can be used to further decide whether a given method should be protected.

Added

• ➕ API key CIDR restrictions — optionally restrict API keys to specific source IP ranges
• ➕ Break-glass passkey support for emergency access
• ➕ Rule blast radius — new CreateRuleBlastRadius RPC and an affected_host_threshold guardrail when creating rules. Affected hosts shown in the UI when creating a block rule.
• ➕ Justifications for self-service and social voting workflows
• ➕ CEL policy additions — AUDIT return value, plus ALLOW_PLATFORM and BLOCK_BINARY_MISMATCH support
• ➕ Added by attribution added to rules
• ➕ Filter bar — filters consolidated into a single search bar; press / to focus, driveable by keyboard alone
• ➕ API Explorer added to the docs site
• ➕ Telemetry filter expression documentation
• ➕ “Test Bucket” button on all bucket configuration fields to make it easier to verify whether permission policies are correct at configuration time.
• ➕ Processed time now exposed on events
• ➕ Added extra indexes to events for faster per-host event queries
• ➕ Added “App Inventory” command to request Santa upload an inventory of all applications/binaries found under a path. This can be sent to any tag, or individual host.
• ➕ Added “Binary Upload” command to request Santa upload a copy of a binary from a host. Requires a “Binary Upload” bucket to be configured in advance. Added buttons to trigger these uploads from the Host Details page and from an Event Details page

Changed

• ↔️ Callout clarifying that automatic updates apply to Workshop only
• ↔️ Sync is now triggered when tag↔group mappings change
• ↔️ Toned down CheckBlockableForSession error noise and dropped plugin-disabled logging from Warn to Debug
• ↔️ Updated CEL fallback-rule commentary to note Santa version requirements
• ↔️ Settings pages are now alphabetized and each sub-page is a full part of the URL
• ↔️ Events from Santa 2026.5+ for platform binaries are now categorized as “Platform” instead of “Certificate”
• ↔️ “Online Status” field on Host Details renamed to “Push Notifications” to better reflect what the field is showing

Fixed

• ❗ AI Settings enabled/disabled state could desync between toggle and backend
• ❗ AI Chat now filters out non-chat models from provider listings and excludes admin/settings methods to stay within the OpenAI 128-tool limit
• ❗ AI Chat settings wiped the provider/key on initial load
• ❗ Renaming a tag could break approval workflows referencing it
• ❗ Filtering by sync status in package rules didn’t work
• ❗ Telemetry query URL state caused a feedback loop and overly large queries are no longer pushed to the URL
• ❗ publishmetrics no longer fails when called before the host record exists
• ❗ Hosts now handle ERROR_COMMAND_DISABLED correctly
• ❗ Some mutations made using MCP bypassed audit record logging
• ❗ When updating rules in-place, redirect to the new rule instead of showing an error
• ❗ Fleet CPU/RAM statistics now drops stale entries to avoid drag

Fixed

• ❗ Updated Next.js to 16.2.6 to to fix several vulnerabilities

Fixed

• ❗ Resolves an issue where event exports (execution, file access, USB mount, and network mount) could skip exporting events when a host’s clock was skewed into the future. The export cursor would advance past legitimate events that hadn’t been exported yet.