Subscription Health Dashboard Update: Optimize Deployments and Identify Issues

For VM teams navigating the complex realm of cybersecurity tools, ensuring deployment health is paramount. Swift methods are required to pinpoint issues amidst complexity. Challenges such as duplicate entries, ghost hosts, and decommissioned devices can obstruct these views, hindering data cleanliness in the platform. To address these hurdles, Qualys practitioners must apply best practices. Reliable, scalable asset data is essential for robust security and compliance.

Enter our updated, optimized Subscription Health Indicators dashboard, designed to empower teams to confidently ensure efficiency and reliability in digitally safeguarding their assets in this fast-paced environment.

Announcing the Optimized Subscription Health Indicators Dashboard

As previously highlighted in of our Performance Tuning Series blog, this dynamic dashboard was crafted to equip teams with actionable insights that help improve their Qualys experience. Playing a pivotal role in optimizing subscription management, this dashboard serves as a vital resource for tracking deployments, assessing health, and identifying stale hosts for purging cycles. By uncovering issues that may impede data cleanliness, asset unification, and adherence to best practices within the Qualys ecosystem, this tool ensures smooth and efficient operations.

To put it another way, the Qualys Subscription Health Indicators dashboard has been an ‘anchor,’ ensuring all the best practice levers are engaged and reporting is accurate. As deployments expand, assets are added, and scanners and agents continue rolling, drift can be caught while the Qualys platform automatically correlates and cleans, making your experience smooth and predictable.

Quick Note on Widgets and Dashboards

Unified Dashboards are built with queries that run the moment you load your Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform view. Qualys Query Language (QQL) is used to build widgets. These are the ‘building blocks’ for dynamic reporting in Qualys. Qualys also has lab-built Dashboard templates and widget templates for teams to use!

Once dashboards are imported, the queries spring into action, instantly firing based on the latest data. With Qualys, you have a treasure trove of knobs and levers to play with, enabling teams to transform real, live data into a visual masterpiece that perfectly suits your needs.

Optimizations and Enhancements

In this update, we added widgets that highlight Qualys’ ability to see all assets, regardless of their location. Responding to optimization requests, we added additional Qualys product coverage awareness and have included ‘bootstrap’ content within each widget to equip readers with essential knowledge.

Each widget’s purpose is defined. Hover over titles and see key information on how to interpret the data. Follow reference links to fix the issue or dive in on next steps.

• Not seeing assets or running states in the Cloud section? Follow the link to get your Cloud Connectors configured.
• Watching your stale asset count grow? Configure automated purge rules, keeping your reporting clean.
• Agents with Vulnerability Management or Patch Management not working? Follow the KB links to get VM or PM enabled on those assets.

The Qualys Unified Dashboard widgets query instantly, dynamically feeding live data into view, the moment you load it up! As always, each widget is clickable, allowing a quick report to be created based on that specific query.

Ensure robust coverage for your asset awareness, zero-in on stale data, track authentication record health, identify access issues and potential ghost hosts with this tool!

3 Techniques to Ensure Clean and Accurate Data in Your Subscription

To maintain clean and accurate data within your subscription, focus on three critical practices: enabling correlation ID, agent merge and unification settings, automating the purging of stale data and operationalizing the Subscription Health Dashboard.

• Configure Automatic correlation, and merging, to ensure a unified view of your assets. By default, Qualys will show different asset records for agent and IP-based scanned assets. With authenticated scans and Agent correlation traffic enabled, merging and unification of data in Qualys becomes automatic!
  • Enable data correlation in your subscription.
  • Enable Cloud Agent merge.
    • Note: Qualys Cloud Agent can merge authenticated and unauthenticated scans
• Automate Purging of Stale Data. Essential for maintaining a clean and accurate Platform experience. Ensure teams can stay in licensing compliance and maintain clear visibility on valid assets that pose a risk to the organization. This prevents teams from chasing down remediation tasks for assets that have been decommissioned.
  • Configure Purge Rules.
    • The Platform comes with pre-configured purge rules that can used or customized.
    • Automated purging can also be achieved through the API.
    • Purging Guidance: Purging: What, why, when, how, what happens to the data?
• Monitor efforts with the Subscription Health Dashboard. This tool is your starting point to knock out anything that gets in the way of the platform’s ability to unify your asset views and report accurately.
  • Qualys licensing and deployments
  • Authentication and access
  • Stale asset insight
  • Subscription diagnostics

Be informed, and stay compliant, as you track the health of your Qualys subscription!

Conclusion

By enabling automated correlation, merging, and purge rules, teams leveraging the Subscription Health Dashboard can confidently maintain clean and accurate data in the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform!

Want to implement this in your subscription today? No need to wait! Go to the Dashboard picker, hit the + symbol for, ‘Create New Dashboard’, and search in the text field.

Click ‘Use template’, to pull in your NEW Qualys Subscription Health Indicators dashboard!

Once imported, feel free to customize, secure, and share with your team.

If you have questions, please schedule time with your Qualys Technical Account Manager or Solutions Architect. We will be happy to walk you through this tool to show you how to measure, communicate and eliminate risk, while extracting maximum value from the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk platform!

Contributors

A special thanks from the author to our contributors:

• Russ Sanderlin, Director, SME, VMDR
• Raviraj Bagale, Senior Product Manager, VMDR
• Brian Canaday, Security Solutions Architect
• Kevin O’Keefe, Senior Security Solutions Architect