DevOps6 min read

Reading Your First Vibgrate Report: Scores, Findings, and Priority Actions Explained

You ran your first scan — now what? This guide walks through every section of the Vibgrate report output, explains what each finding means, and shows how to turn the Priority Actions list into concrete backlog items.

Peter Chapman

Peter Chapman

Vibgrate Blog

Anatomy of a Vibgrate Report

When you run vibgrate scan ., the CLI produces a structured report designed to be read top-to-bottom: from the big picture to the specific actions. Let us walk through each section.

The Header: Score and Risk Level

The first thing you see is the overall Upgrade Drift Score and its corresponding risk level (Low, Moderate, or High). This is your headline metric — the single number that answers "how far behind is this repo?"

If you are scanning a monorepo or a workspace with multiple projects, the header shows the workspace-level aggregate score. Individual project scores appear further down.

Score Component Breakdown

Below the header, four visual bars show how each component contributes to the overall score:

  • Runtime: Is your Node.js / .NET / Python / Java version current?
  • Frameworks: Are your core frameworks on the latest major version?
  • Dependencies: What fraction of your packages are current vs. lagging?
  • EOL Risk: How close are you to end-of-life dates?

Each bar is color-coded: green for healthy, amber for moderate, red for high risk. This decomposition tells you where the drift is concentrated. A project might score 55 overall, but if the runtime component is red and everything else is green, you know exactly where to focus.

Per-Project Details

For each detected project — whether it is a package.json Node project, a .csproj .NET project, a Python manifest, or a Java build file — you get:

  • Project path and type: So you know which project you are looking at.
  • Runtime version detected vs. latest: The exact version gap.
  • Framework versions: Each detected framework with its current and latest versions.
  • Dependency distribution: A breakdown of how many packages are current, one major behind, or two-plus majors behind.

Findings

Findings are the actionable intelligence of the report. Each finding has:

  • Severity: Error (critical — should be addressed immediately), Warning (important — plan for it), or Note (informational — worth knowing).
  • Title: A concise description of the issue.
  • Detail: Context about why this matters and what the risk is.

Typical findings include:

  • "Node.js runtime is 3 major versions behind (v18 → v22 available)"
  • "React is 2 major versions behind (v17 → v19 available)"
  • "47% of dependencies are 2+ major versions behind"
  • "Runtime EOL in 94 days"

Findings are not noise — they are filtered and ranked by the thresholds configured in your vibgrate.config.ts (or the sensible defaults if you have not configured anything yet).

Top Priority Actions

This is the most immediately useful section. Vibgrate ranks the highest-impact upgrades you can make — not by alphabetical order or severity alone, but by a combination of:

  • Risk reduction: How much does this upgrade reduce your exposure?
  • Score impact: How many points will this add to your drift score?
  • Estimated effort: Is this a version bump or a major migration?

The Priority Actions list is designed to be copied directly into your backlog. Each item is specific enough to become a ticket: "Upgrade React from 17.0.2 to 19.1.0" or "Update Node.js runtime from 18 to 22."

The JSON Artifact

Behind the text output, Vibgrate writes a complete JSON artifact to .vibgrate/scan_result.json. This artifact contains everything in the text report plus raw data that does not fit a terminal display: full dependency lists, version numbers, timestamps, VCS metadata.

You can use this artifact to:

  • Generate Markdown reports: vibgrate report --in .vibgrate/scan_result.json --format md
  • Compare against a baseline to see drift delta
  • Upload to the Vibgrate dashboard for trend visualisation
  • Feed into custom dashboards or reporting tools

Turning a Report into Action

Here is a practical workflow for your first report:

  1. Read the score — is it Low, Moderate, or High?
  2. Check the components — where is the drift concentrated?
  3. Scan the findings — are there any errors (red) that need immediate attention?
  4. Take the top 3 Priority Actions — create tickets, estimate effort, and schedule them.
  5. Re-scan after fixing — watch your score improve.

The Vibgrate Drift Intelligence Engine is designed to make this loop fast and repeatable. Each scan takes seconds. Each report is deterministic. Each action is specific.

Turn your report into a plan. Sign up at dash.vibgrate.com to track your drift score over time, compare projects, and share reports with your team.

Topics

#vibgrate-cli#reports#findings#priority-actions#tutorial

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