Understand Findings
A finding is anything Enterprise TruRisk Management (ETM) detects on an asset that represents risk a vulnerability or a misconfiguration. Findings are the raw material that everything else in ETM — TruRisk scoring, prioritization, remediation, and reporting — is built on, so getting a clear, de-duplicated, well-understood set of findings is the foundation of the whole program.
This topic explains what a finding is and how it is represented in ETM. The topics that follow it walk through the journey a finding takes, from the moment a scanner or connector reports it to the moment you investigate it on the Findings page.
Navigate to: Risk Management > Findings
What Is a Finding
Every finding in ETM is tied to an asset and carries a common set of attributes regardless of which source reported it for example a severity or QVSS score, a status, a title, and identifiers such as CVE ID or CWE ID. Keeping these attributes consistent across sources is what lets you filter, group, and score findings from Qualys VMDR, Policy Compliance, WAS, and third-party connectors side by side.
Finding Types
- Vulnerability — a weakness, typically tied to a CVE, detected on a host or web application asset.
- Misconfiguration — a control or policy check, tied to a technology and title, that failed on an asset.
Both types share the same underlying pipeline and appear together on the Findings page, with dedicated Vulnerabilities and Misconfigurations tabs for type-specific columns and details.
Finding Lifecycle Status
A finding's status tells you where it stands at the moment: NEW when first detected, ACTIVE while still present, FIXED once remediated, or REOPENED if it reappears after being fixed. Misconfigurations use PASS and FAIL to reflect whether the underlying control check currently passes.
Status is one of the attributes available as a search token and as a Custom Attribute input, so you can build dashboards or filters around findings that just went active, or that were recently fixed.
From Raw Data to Investigated Risk
Before a finding ever reaches the Findings page, ETM takes it through several stages. Each stage is covered in its own topic: