Nessus Agent

Nessus Agents™ compliment traditional network vulnerability scanning to give you visibility into additional IT assets—like endpoints, and other remote assets that intermittently connect to the internet. They collect asset and system information and send it back to Tenable.io® or Tenable.sc™ (formerly SecurityCenter) for analysis. You get a low footprint agent that extends scan coverage and increases scan flexibility.

## KEY BENEFITS

* **Extend scan coverage** to laptops and other transient devices.

* **Remove credential headaches** –once deployed, agents no longer require host credentials to run future scans.

* **Reduce network scan performance overhead**.

* **Easy to deploy and can be installed anywhere**.

* **Highly secure** –including leveraging encryption to protect your data.

* **Scan quickly** –perform rapid scans on demand with little network impact.

## Important

**Nessus Agent is a commercial product that requires a license to use.** [See the Licensing Requirement](https://docs.tenable.com/generalrequirements/Content/NessusLicensingRequirements.htm) for more information.

**Nessus Agent is useless by itself!** At a minimum, you should have the IP address/port of a Tenable server to which the Agent can connect and a *Linking Key* for the server. Provide those (and other) options using the `--installarguments` (`--ia`) switch:

##### Most Common

* `NESSUS_SERVER=(IP Address):(port)`

* `NESSUS_KEY=(Linking Key)`

* `NESSUS_GROUPS="(Group names)"`

##### Other options

* `NESSUS_NAME`

* `NESSUS_PROXY_AGENT`

* `NESSUS_PROXY_PASSWORD`

* `NESSUS_PROXY_SERVER`