Agents are also managed and updated via the managers. Once agents are connected, they send host and vulnerability reports back to one of these managers. Nessus Agents are packaged for installation on their respective platforms, and after installation, a scriptable command can be used to register the agent with Tenable.io Vulnerability Management or Tenable On-Prem Agent Managers (for Tenable.sc or Tenable.sc Continuous View). Agents run under the local SYSTEM account in Windows or root on Unix-based operating systems, and require sufficient privileges to install software under that account on setup.
To see the latest supported operating systems, visit and look for System Requirements in the Nessus documentation. Nessus Agents currently support Windows, Mac and many flavors of Linux. Agents collect vulnerability, compliance and system data and report that information back to a manager. Nessus Agents are lightweight programs that are installed locally on a host.