Scan jobs and related terms
To tune your system correctly, you must understand how scan jobs run and how
the options you define in policies affect jobs and subtasks.

Definitions

The following table describes the terms used by the Enterprise Scanner agent in
the scanning process:
Table8. Terms related to scanning jobs
Term Description
Criticality A user-assigned setting that indicates the
relative importance of an asset to other
assets:
vCritical
vHigh
vMedium
vUnassigned (the default)
vLow
Scan job SiteProtectorschedules a scan job in the
Command Jobs window, either at the
beginning of a refresh cycle or when you
initiate an ad hoc scan. The scan job divides
the scan into subtasks and displays its
progress. Scans might not start processing as
soon as they are posted if they run only
within scan windows and no scan window
is open.
Task A scan job is divided into tasks as described
in “Types of tasks” on page 72.
Subtask The portion of a task assigned to an agent at
one time. A subtask includes the number of
IPs to discover or the number of assets to
scan based on settings in the Networking
policy for the agent that runs the scan. You
should change the following field names:
vMaximum IPs per Discovery Subtask
vMaximum Assets per Assessment Subtask

Assets with unassigned criticality

The criticality levels in the definition above are listed in order from highest to
lowest criticality. The Unassigned level is intentionally higher than the Low level for
the following reasons:
vThe default criticality level for a newly discovered asset is Unassigned because
the criticality is unknown until you assign it another criticality level.
vBecause you must specifically assign the Low level to an asset, Enterprise
Scanner places it below Unassigned assets because unassigned assets might be of
a higher criticality.
Chapter4. Understanding scanning processes in SiteProtector 71