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Scanning

Find your way around the Scanning command center and see how schedules, targets, credentials and profiles work together.

Overview

The Scanning page is the command center for network discovery. From one screen you plan recurring scans, define what to scan, store the credentials the scanners log in with, tune scanner settings, and review every scan run.

Open it from the sidebar under Discover. The entries Scan Scheduling, Scan Targets, Scan Credentials and Scan Results each open the matching tab. Users with scans:read can view everything on the page. Creating, editing, running and deleting needs scans:write.

Screen tour

  1. Estate: how many schedules are enabled out of the total, how many targets you have (and how many are active), and a countdown to the next scheduled run with that schedule’s name. When scans are in progress, a live running count appears here too.
  2. Last 24h: the number of scan executions started in the last 24 hours and the number of assets they discovered. A sweep and the per-device scans it launches count as one execution.
  3. Attention: shows No failures in 24h when everything succeeded. When an execution failed, it shows an alert such as 2 failed scans in 24h — review. Click it to open the Results tab filtered to Failed.
  4. Updated: how long ago the page data was refreshed. The page refreshes itself every 30 seconds, and every 2 seconds while a scan is running.
  5. Refresh data: reloads schedules, targets, credentials and results immediately.
  6. Primary action: changes with the active tab: New Schedule, New Target, New Credential or New Profile. The Results tab has no primary action.
  7. Tabs: Schedules, Results, Targets, Credentials and Profiles. The Results tab shows a red badge with the number of failed executions in the last 24 hours.

The five tabs

TabWhat you do there
SchedulesCreate recurring scans, run them on demand, and pause or resume them. See Schedules.
ResultsFollow running scans, inspect failures and discovered devices, retry scans and export results. See Scan results.
TargetsSave the addresses and ranges you scan, with the scan type for each. See Scan targets.
CredentialsStore the logins the scanners and cloud connectors use. See Scan credentials.
ProfilesSave reusable scanner settings such as ports, timeouts and concurrency. See Scan profiles.

Each tab keeps its search text and filters in the page address, so you can bookmark or share a filtered view. For example, /scanning?tab=results&rs=failed opens the failed results.

How a scan is put together

A scheduled scan combines four building blocks:

  1. Target: what to scan and how. A target is an IP address, CIDR range, hostname or FQDN, plus a scan type such as Sweep, SSH, WMI, SNMP, VMware or Hypervisor (Proxmox).
  2. Credential (optional): who the scanner logs in as. For a single host, the credential authenticates the scan itself. For a range target, the credential is used for the authenticated per-host follow-up scans that run after discovery.
  3. Scan profile (optional): which settings the scanner uses, such as the ports a sweep probes or the timeout of an SSH scan. A profile matches one scan type and applies only to targets with that scan type.
  4. Schedule: when the scan runs. The schedule points at one saved target, an optional credential and an optional profile, and adds a cadence, a priority and, optionally, a bridge host agent that runs the scan inside a remote network.

When the cadence fires, or when you click Run now, DeviceQuest starts a scan job. Results appear on the Results tab, and the discovered devices are added to or updated in the asset inventory.

  1. On Credentials, create the credential your devices accept, for example an SSH account for Linux servers.
  2. On Targets, add the range to discover, for example 10.20.0.0/24 with scan type Sweep.
  3. Optionally, on Profiles, create a profile with the ports and timeouts that suit the network.
  4. On Schedules, create a schedule that uses the target, the credential and the profile, and choose a cadence.
  5. Click Run now to start the first scan instead of waiting for the cadence, then follow it on Results.

Which credential a scan uses

When a scan needs a credential, DeviceQuest picks it in this order:

  1. The default credential assigned to the asset itself (set on the asset’s detail page).
  2. The credential selected on the schedule.
  3. The first active credential of the matching type.

Keyboard shortcuts

KeyAction
← / →With focus on the tab bar, move to the previous or next tab.
Home / EndWith focus on the tab bar, move to the first or last tab.