Pre-Installation Steps

Check the following important points before proceeding to installation.

Activation Key for a Cloud Agent

You need an activation key to install and activate a Cloud Agent for your asset. The activation key allows you to group Cloud Agent and add it to your Qualys Cloud Platform account. You can create different activation keys for various business functions and users.

Also, tags assigned to your activation key are also assigned to the associated Cloud Agent. This helps you manage your Cloud Agent and report the agent hosts.

Agent Installer

To install a Cloud Agent, you have to run the agent installer from an elevated command prompt. You can also use a system management tool with elevated privileges to install a Cloud Agent.

You can install any number of agents but can activate a Cloud Agent only if you have a valid activation key. The Agents tab in the Cloud Agent user interface tells you about your installed agents.

Provisioning the Cloud Agent

Once installed, Cloud Agents connect to the Qualys Cloud Platform and provision themselves. You can see agent status on the Agents tab in the Cloud Agent user interface. The Cloud Agent status is continuously updated. If your agent does not have a status, it means the Cloud Agent is not connected to the Qualys Cloud Platform, and you need to troubleshoot it.

To perform the agent host assessment, ensure that your Cloud Agent is activated for Qualys applications such as Vulnerability Management, Policy Compliance, and File Integrity Monitoring. You can set up auto-activation by defining the required applications in the activation key itself, or you can manually activate it from Cloud Agent UI.

If you skip the Cloud Agent activation, the Cloud Agent collects only inventory information such as IP address, OS, DNS Hostnames, NetBIOS names, and MAC address and does not perform agent host assessment.

Net Tool Packages

If the net-tools package is not already present on agent endpoints, you may need to install it to run network commands. This is required on systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and CentOS version 7.1 since some commands like netstat, /sbin/ifconfig, and route are deprecated.