Agents (2024)

Agentsincrease scan flexibility by making it easy to scan assets without needing ongoing host credentials or assets that are offline. Agents allow for large-scale concurrent scanning with little network impact.

After you install a Tenable Nessus Agent on a host and link the agent to Tenable Vulnerability Management, the agent appears on the Tenable Vulnerability Management Linked Agents page.

Note: If you assign one or more agents to a network and any of those agents are already assigned to another custom network, a confirmation message appears indicating that, by adding agents to this network, they are reassigned from their previous networks.

Agents send the following information to Tenable Vulnerability Management:

• Version information (agent version, host architecture)

  See Also

  Tenable Ranks #1 for Fifth Consecutive Year in Market Share in Device Vulnerability Management

• Versions of installed Tenable plugins

• OS information (for example, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Service Pack 1)

• Tenable asset IDs (for example, /etc/tenable_tag on Unix, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tenable\TAG on Windows)

• Network interface information (network interface names, MAC addresses, IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, hostnames and DNS information if available)

• Hostname if update_hostname is set to yes (see Tenable Nessus Agent Advanced Settings for more information)

• AWS EC2 instance metadata, if available:

  Note: Tenable Nessus Agent connect to 169.254.169.254 to provide AWS metadata to Tenable Vulnerability Management; traffic between Tenable Nessus Agent and 169.254.169.254 is normal and expected behavior.

Note: Agents check in on start, after a restart, and whenever metadata is updated (no more than every 10 minutes).

For more information, see the following topics: