This article is targeting the No Scan Window feature and its use cases.

Location

We can find this feature by browsing to the Scan Surface menu and clicking the Deployed Scanners tab.

Here we can see all deployed scanners. At a closer look we can see that each scanner has some configuration elements in the bottom right corner. Please focus on the incon that looks like a clock, as seen in the following illustration:

Configuration

By default, each scanner is configured to scan continuously (24/7). Editing the scanning window allows the creation of a no scan window (a time period in which the scanner will not perform any scanning).

The menu is visible below. For convenience the configurator will take into account the time zone of your instance, so please make sure to input the hours accordingly. After inputting your preferred hours you may press the Set Intervals button . In case you would wish to no longer use the ‘no scanning window’ you can always click on the Reset intervals button to clear the configuration.

When entering the ‘no scanning window’ timeframe, the Footprint Application will stop all existing scan activity. Please keep in mind that sometimes it may take up to 15 minutes to stop all activity when the ‘no scan window’ is configured.

Below you can observe an example configuration. The configured ‘no scan window’ is set to start at 8:00 UTC-4 and end at 18:00 UTC-4 (that is 8 AM to 6 PM). This means that in-between those hours there will be no scanning activity.

Use Cases

The ‘no scan window’ may be helpful in a few use cases as follows.

In case you don’t want the scan activity to interfere with the office hours. You can configure the ‘no scan window’ to run the scans overnight - configure it to start at the beginning of working hours and end right after working hours. This would enable the scanner to initiate it’s scans immediately after the ‘no scan window’ has ended and perform scans until the onset of the next ‘no scan window’ interval and a maximum of 15 minutes after this time.

In case you want to keep scanning all of your networks but also need to minimize network overhead or allow maximum throughput for business applications during specific times. You can use the ‘no scan window’ to reduce the bandwidth scans use up. Simply configure your scanners to alternate scanning - when one is scanning the other one is in a ‘no scan window’ and vice-versa. Remember that the ‘no scan window’ is a per scanner setting.