How long nessus scan

In summary there are targets to scan. And the scan should be done in less than 50 hours weekend. Just for a little pre check i scanned 12 targets and the scan took 4 hours.

This is way to long for our szenario. I checked the nessus. Do you guys have any idea what could be the reason? And maybe an idea what i could do to resolve this time problem? First, leave all Plugins enabled when scanning, Nessus is smart enough to know which Plugins are relevant during the scan. The position of the Nessus Scanner within the network is an important factor when considering the speed, if the traffic has to go through many different network kit, or across slow bandwidth issues, that will slow the scanning time down.

Also, how busy the target devices are during the scan window is another thing to consider. Nessus will slow down if the network is congested or the target device is busy. If your network is heavily segmented, you could upgrade to Tenable. This would speed up the scanning time as all the scanners work on the problem of scanning.

I use Tenable. Thanks for the link - I'm already checking my settings. There can be multiple reasons. To start with few, you should check whether the Security Center has sufficient resources.

Then check network connectivity between the scanner and target specifically check whether the firewall. Also verify whether the target machine has the load or may be the site your scanning is too big in number of pages.

As I can see, everything is fine related to SC and hosts. But the point I am concerned about is that, I am scanning more than thousand hosts at a time. Has this scan always taken this long to complete, or is it something new that is happening? It would also depend on the range you where scanning, clearly the higher the range longer the scan.

May suggest in conjuction with the anwers above you may wish to to cut the scan ranges down. For example instead of 1 scan of devices do 5 scans of Well it depends on how many devices are you scanning and what OS do they consist of?

Are you using authenticated scans? Are you running into traffic being throttled? I am scanning around 1K devices in a scan. The scan is authenticated and have some custom plugins. Previously the scan wasn't taking long time, but after plugin DB update it is taking longer time. Try to schedule these scans after business working hours. There might be a reason of bandwidth choke if employees or clients using internet. This formula is better for more devices. Web crawler: Max pages , max depth 6, follow dynamic off.

The scanner that scanned tasked with the most IPs is a 24 core 2. The other is 12 core 2. If you export plugin ID with the output, the following formulas may help with the data review replace "C2" with cell the output is in :. You can also get specific plugin duration from the Nessus logs if you ever want to go that deep.

There is a way to set a timeout for a specific plugin separate from the global plugin timeout, but you can lose information this way. Its a trade-off. Very good analysis, thank you!

Back to tenable. Please login or register here: Self Register. Ask the Community Instead! View This Post. May 27, at PM. Hi, I wonder if 20 minutes is the normal average time for a single advanced scan with basic settings. Network timeout 5 secs Max simultaneous checks per host 5 Max simultaneous hosts per scan 30 I am tempted to increase the max checks per host but the support already told me once that if the nessus runs out of resources, it starts skipping plugins so wrong results could happen.