In order to have the Scan Engine scan targets at specific times of day, or on certain days of the week, we need to set up a recurring scan that has one or more "Scan Windows" defined.
Prerequisite Steps
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- You need to have your targets and credentials defined and assigned into one or more projects
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- You need to know how long it takes a manual scan of each project to complete.
If the scan takes longer to complete than your rescan period things will not work.
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- You need to work out how often you need to rescan the devices.
Define how often the project should be scanned
Either creating a new project or re-configuring an existing project, you define the "Rescan every ? days" to have a number greater than than or equal to 1. (Leaving this at zero means no automatic rescan)
Setting it to 1 means rescan daily. Setting it to 28 would mean rescan once each month.
Once the rescan interval has been defined, then the "Next Rescan" information in the project summary screen should display when the next rescan will take place.
This information applies to the entire project.
Define when certain locations in the project should be scanned
Once the scan targets have been configured for each location, the scan windows can be configured as follows:
Go into Locations → Scan Windows and click on the "Create" button in order to make a new scan window.
To set up a scan window which will allow devices to be scanned, we need to provide a start date, a recurring time, and a duration in minutes.
In the example below we are setting a scan window to scan devices during normal office hours (this would be suitable to scan end-user desktops/laptops)
For a project with multiple child locations, different scan windows can be assigned to different sub locations. In this example, we will make sure that client devices are scanned during working hours (because they will probably be off outside working hours) and that servers are scanned late in the evening so as not to disrupt work.
These two scan windows were defined at lunchtime on the 2nd of November. When we then look at the Scan Windows, the "Next Start" for each of these is listed as follows:
The servers will start the same evening:
The client devices will next start the following morning since the start of the scan window has already passed: