Upgrades and Tenable Product Lifecycles

In most large environments, Tenable recommends updating your Tenable products quarterly to take advantage of the feature and security updates in the latest versions of Tenable products.

To plan and prepare for a Tenable Security Center upgrade:

Review the Tenable Security Center Release Notes for information about new features, bug fixes, supported upgrade paths, and integrated product version requirements.

If your upgrade path skips versions of Tenable Security Center (e.g., upgrading from 5.6.2.1 to 5.12.0), Tenable recommends reviewing the release notes for all skipped versions. You may need to update your configurations because of features and functionality added in skipped versions.

Tenable Security Center versions sometimes require:
- A specific minimum version of a downstream product (for example, Tenable Nessus) for complete feature support.
- An updated set of minimum hardware requirements.
- A separate installation or configuration for a third-party product integration.
Perform a backup and validate it before beginning the upgrade, as described in Backup and Failover.
Test the upgrade in a test environment before deploying it to your production environment.
Tenable recommends performing upgrades on your highest tier Tenable Security Center instances first. For example, upgrade your reporting tier Tenable Security Center instance, then your scanning tier Tenable Security Center instance, then your individual scanners.

Architecture Review and Hardware Refresh

Tenable recommends performing an architecture review and considering a hardware refresh every three to five years. You may want to do this more frequently if your underlying environment changes or increases in size, or if your vulnerability policies change (for example, you increase your data retention from 180 to 365 days).

Tenable Product Lifecycles

For information about end-of-support (EOS) and end-of-life (EOL) dates for Tenable products, see the Tenable Software Release Lifecycle Matrix.