Qualys Network Passive Sensor 

With Qualys Network Passive Sensor (NPS), you can automatically detect and profile devices connected to your network, eliminating blind spots across your IT environment. NPS monitors network activity without any active probing of devices to detect active assets in your network.

Virtual Appliance supports a maximum throughput of 2 Gbps. It can be scaled up or down depending on its allocated resources. For more details, refer to the Appendix section.

Network Requirements and Configuration

Make sure that your network follows the prerequisites mentioned in the following table:

Parameters Requirement

Bandwidth

Minimum recommended bandwidth connection of 1 Megabits per second (Mbps) to the Qualys Cloud Platform for a network containing around 10,000 assets.

Appliance Access

The Network Passive Sensor must be able to reach certain infrastructure located on the Qualys Cloud Platform where your Qualys account is located. The local network must be configured to allow outbound HTTPS (port 443) access to the Internet so that the Network Passive Sensor can communicate with the Qualys Cloud Platform.

Log into your account and go to Help > About to see the Qualys Cloud Platform URLs.

DHCP or Static IP

The Virtual Sensor is preconfigured with DHCP by default. If it is configured with a static IP address, be sure you have the IP address, netmask, default gateway, and primary DNS.

Proxy Support

The Virtual Sensor includes Proxy support with or without authentication. Proxy-level termination (for example, as implemented in SSL bridging ) is not supported. SOCKS proxies are not supported.

Before you Begin - Mirror the Traffic

You need to feed traffic to the appliance by mirroring it (using a physical tap or mirror port). Connect the mirrored port to the appliance's sniffing interface. This step is required to see discovered assets.

Network Passive Sensor supports mirror traffic for SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN methods. For more information, refer to the Deployment Guide.

Get Started

Once you complete the setup, the NPS starts discovering assets on your network. It takes just a couple of minutes.

Perform the following steps to set up the Network Passive Sensor:

  1. Download Virtualization Image
  2. Generate Personalization Code
  3. Deploy Virtualization Image
  4. Register Virtual Appliance
  5. Check Status

Related Topic

Manage Sensors