Scan Jobs And Related Terms - IBM Proventia Network Enterprise Scanner User Manual

Scan Jobs and Related Terms

Introduction
Definitions
Assets with
unassigned
criticality
Scheduled and
running scans
The importance of
tasks and subtasks
IBM Proventia Network Enterprise Scanner User Guide, Version 1.3
To tune your system correctly, you must understand how scan jobs run and how the
options you define in policies affect jobs and subtasks.
Table 43 describes the terms that describe the scanning process:
Term Description
Criticality A user-assigned setting that indicates the relative importance of an asset to
other assets:
• Critical
• High
• Medium
• Unassigned (the default)
• Low
Scan job SiteProtector schedules a scan job in the Command Jobs window, either at the
beginning of a refresh cycle or when you initiate an ad hoc scan. The scan job
divides the scan into subtasks and displays its progress.
Scans may not start processing as soon as they are posted if they run only
within scan windows and no scan window is open.
Task A scan job is divided into tasks as described in "Types of Tasks" on page 128.
Subtask The portion of a task assigned to an agent at one time. A subtask includes the
number of IPs to discover or the number of assets to scan based on settings in
the ESM policy for the agent that runs the scan. The field names you change are
the following:
• Maximum IPs per Discovery Subtask
• Maximum Assets per Assessment Subtask
Table 43: Terms related to scanning jobs
The criticality levels in the definition above are listed in order from highest to lowest
criticality. The Unassigned level is intentionally higher than the Low level for the following
reasons:
The default criticality level for a newly discovered asset is Unassigned because the
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criticality is unknown until you assign it another criticality level.
Since you must specifically assign the Low level to an asset, Enterprise Scanner places
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it below Unassigned assets because unassigned assets may be of a higher criticality.
To make it easier to explain the scanning processes, scans are considered scheduled when
they appear in the Command Jobs window. Because jobs may not start to scan
immediately, they are considered scheduled until the job actually starts to create tasks and
run subtasks.
Because a task assumes the criticality of the assets it contains, Enterprise Scanner can
assign priority factors to tasks based on asset criticality. Because tasks run in units
determined by subtask size, Enterprise Scanner can run subtasks that can run to
completion during an open scanning window.

Scan Jobs and Related Terms

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