Live Results

Nessus updates with new plugins automatically, which allows you to assess your assets for new vulnerabilities. However, if your scan is on an infrequent schedule, the scan may not run new plugins until several days after the plugin update. This gap could leave your assets exposed to vulnerabilities that you are not aware of.

In Nessus Professional and Nessus Expert, you can use live results to view scan results for new plugins based on a scan's most recently collected data, without running a new scan. Live results allow you to see potential new threats and determine if you need to launch a scan manually to confirm the findings. Live results are not results from an active scan; they are an assessment based on already-collected data. Live results don't produce results for new plugins that require active detection, like an exploit, or that require data that was not previously collected.

Live results appear with striped coloring in scan results. In the Vulnerabilities tab, the severity indicator is striped, and the Live icon appears next to the plugin name.

The results page shows a note indicating that the results include live results. Tenable recommends that you manually launch a scan to confirm the findings. The longer you wait between active scans, the more outdated the data may be, which lessens the effectiveness of live results.

To manage live results, see the following: