Qualys Network Passive Sensor helps you to detect automatically, and profile devices connected to your network, eliminating blind spots across your IT environment and gaining visibility to all known and unknown assets in your network. Network Passive Sensor (NPS) monitors network activity without any active probing of the device in order to detect the active assets in your network. It also identifies key device attributes that help the PS Microservices on the cloud platform to catalog the devices into operating system/hardware categories. PS also monitors the traffic flow and reports it to the application, helping identify the amount of chatter between communicating endpoints.
The Network Passive Sensor (physical or virtual) is placed inside your network and takes snapshots of the data flowing over the network. It extracts metadata from these snapshots and sends them to the Qualys Cloud Platform for analysis.
Assets discovered by Passive Sensor are reported to Qualys Asset Inventory where you can see information about them. If an asset discovered by Passive Sensor is already known by active scans or by cloud agents then it is considered a managed asset and the asset data is correlated and merged. If the asset is previously unknown, then it is placed in the unmanaged list of assets.
Qualys Network Passive Sensor is available as a physical or virtual sensor.
Centralized sensor management, including software updates, from the Qualys Cloud Platform for convenience.
For more information about network placement, sensor sizing, mirroring traffic, etc, refer to:
To know about the requirements and how to setup the physical appliance, refer to:
To know about the requirements and how to setup the virtual appliance, refer to:
It is easy to get started with Qualys Network Passive Sensor.
You can configure how you want to monitor traffic flow on assets discovered using the sensors.