Note: This tab is only visible to Scanner Appliance users.
To add a scanner appliance to the asset group, select an appliance from the scanner appliances list on the left and click the Add button. Optionally, to add all available scanner appliances to the group, click the Add All button.
Adding scanner appliances to the asset group gives you the ability to:
• Easily manage which scanner appliances are used to scan which target hosts within your organization.
• (Managers only) Allow Unit Managers and Scanners to select scanner appliances for scan tasks. Unit Managers and Scanners are only able to select scanner appliances in their assigned asset groups.
• Allow users to select the scan time option "All Scanners in Asset Group" for scanner parallelization (distributed scanning). Using this feature you can distribute a scan task to a pool of scanner appliances in each target asset group. You can select this option for any scan, on demand or scheduled.
• Allow users to select the scan time option "Default" to distribute scan tasks to the default scanner appliance in each target asset group. You can select this option for a scan, on demand or scheduled.
The first scanner appliance listed in the Scanner Appliances Added to Group box is initially set as the default for the group. If the group has multiple scanner appliances you can change the default by selecting a scanner appliance in the group and clicking the Set As Default button.
The scanner parallelization feature allows you to distribute a scan task to a pool of scanner appliances in each target asset group. The top five scanner appliances listed in the Scanner Appliances Added to Group box make up the pool of scanners for the group. You can move any appliance in the list by selecting the appliance and using the Up and Down buttons. You'll notice that the order within the top five appliances changes dynamically.
Note that a scan task can only be distributed across scanner appliances that have the same vulnerability signatures version and the same scanning engine version at the time of the scan. You can view version information for a scanner appliance from the scanner appliances list (Tools > Scanner Appliances). If one of the scanner appliances in the pool has a version that does not match the other scanner appliances, it will not be used as this may have a deleterious effect on reporting. If some scanner appliances have identical versions and others do not, then the appliances with the most matching versions are used, regardless if the software is not as current. For example, if 3 scanners have the same vulnerability signatures and scanning engine versions and the other 2 scanners have a different version, then the 3 matching scanners are used.