Performance parameters are part of the agent's configuration profile and organized in these sections:
Parameters for all agent OS and all versions
Consolidated interval an agent requests information from the platform. Range: 900-7200 seconds. Recommended: 7200 for Low performance, 1800 for Normal performance, 900 for High performance. (Previous parameter name was "Update system with Agent's status")
Interval an agent attempts to upload detected changes. Range: 1-1800 seconds. Recommended: 10 for Low performance, 5 for Normal performance, 1 for High performance.
The upload block size, and combined with Delta Upload Interval, determines network utilization. Range: 64-10,240 KB. Recommended: 1024 for Low performance, 2048 for Normal performance, 4096 for High performance.
Interval (in seconds) an agent checks the platform for a new upgrade, if configured to do so. Range: 32400 seconds or more. Recommended: 64800 for Low and Normal performance, 32400 for High performance.
The amount and detail of log messages generated by the agent. Value can be Verbose, Info (i.e. informational), Warn (i.e. Warning), Error or None. Recommended: Verbose for all performance levels.
Configure the interval between the completion of the Priority Status Upload and the start of the next Priority Status Upload. Specify a value between 30 and 300 seconds. Default is 60 seconds.
Defines the percentage limit of the processor core(s) used by the agent. Lower percentages reduce CPU utilization at the expense of longer execution times. Range: 2-100%. Recommended: 5 for Low performance, 20 for Normal performance, 80 for High performance.
Note: This percentage limit does not apply to FIM or EDR processing as these products must maintain real-time processing. These modules are limited to one core (for example, on a 4-core host, 25% peak utilization is possible).
Tunes the amount of processing used by the CPU by introducing delays between agent executions: the higher the value, the less CPU utilized at the expense of longer execution times. Range: 0-1,000 milliseconds. Recommended: 20 for Low performance, 10 for Normal performance, 0 for High performance.
Note: This setting works only on Unix platform version 1.6 and later.
Provides different modes where you can select the different privileges to run VM scan.
Note: This setting works only on Unix platform version 5.x or later.
The different modes available are as follows:
- Agent configured user permissions: Qualys Agent runs VM scan with the same privileges configured by the customer to run Qualys Agent.
- Safe mode: Qualys Agent runs the VM scan only with lower privileges and would not run any commands/binary with elevated privileges.
- Dynamic privilege elevation: By default, Qualys Agent runs the VM scan lower privileges. However, the Cloud Agent will dynamically elevate the privileges to root access only for those commands that failed due to permissions with lower privileges.
Note: For the Safe mode and Dynamic Privilege elevation, the Cloud Agent must be configured with the non-root user which is part of the Sudo group.