Tenable.io Vulnerability Management
Licensing Calculation Refinement FAQ
Last updated 3/14/2018
The Tenable.io Vulnerability Management licensing calculation model is being refined on March 20,
2018. This FAQ answers key questions about these calculation changes.
What is changing in how Tenable.io Vulnerability
Management is priced and licensed?
The Tenable.io Vulnerability Management licensing calculation
model is being refined to improve licensed asset identification
and support for dynamic cloud workloads. This enables a more
accurate count of asset usage over time. There is no change to
the actual product pricing itself.
Key Date

March 20, 2018: The licensing calculation
refinement will be released
Why has Tenable decided to implement this license calculation change?
Prior to this change, Tenable.io Vulnerability Management sensors would sometimes generate spurious data when
discovering assets during licensed scans. For example, if a licensed scan hits a proxy server, the proxy could respond
with hundreds or thousands of IP addresses that end up as licensed assets when in fact a real asset does not exist.
Additionally, licensed assets with short lifespans measured in hours or days would need to age out over 90 days
before that license could be reclaimed. The revised licensing calculation will accommodate these scenarios and give
customers confidence that their licensed asset count reflects the true number of assets that they are assessing.
How does Tenable.io Vulnerability Management determine which assets will count
against a license?
Prior to this change, Tenable.io Vulnerability Management allocated licenses to all assets identified through
scans using non-Host Discovery scan policies (eg: Advanced Network Scan). Going forward, the allocation of
licenses will be determined by the results of the scan, instead of by the policy that is used for the scan:

If only discovery scan plugins return results when scanning a particular asset, it will not allocate a
license to that asset.

However, if one or more non-discovery plugins return results when scanning a particular asset, it will
allocate a license to that asset.

Assets will continue to count against the license for 90 days from the last licensed scan date.
Below is a list of discovery scan plugins:
Plugin id
Plugin Name
10180
Ping the remote host
10287
Traceroute information
10335
Nessus TCP scanner
11219
Nessus SYN scanner
11933
Do not scan printers
11936
OS Identification
12053
FQDN Resolution
14272
Netstat Portscanner (SSH)
14272
Nessus SNMP Scanner
19506
Nessus Scan Information
22964
Service Detection
33812 and 33813 Port scanner settings / dependency
34220
Netstat Portscanner (WMI)
34227
Nessus UDP Scanner
45990
Common Platform Enumeration
54615
Device Type
87413
Host Tagging
For More Information: Please visit tenable.com
Contact Us: Please email us at sales@tenable.com or visit tenable.com/contact
Copyright © 2018. Tenable Network Security, Inc. All rights reserved. Tenable Network Security and Nessus are registered trademarks of Tenable Network Security, Inc. Tenable and Tenable.io are
trademarks of Tenable Network Security, Inc. All other products or services are trademarks of their respective owners.
Tenable.io Vulnerability Management
Licensing Calculation Refinement FAQ
Last updated 3/14/2018
How will this licensing refinement better support assets with short lifespans that
may only live for hours or days?
Prior to this change, all licensed assets aged out 90 days after the last licensed scan, at which point the license was
reclaimed. Going forward, an asset’s license will be reclaimed as soon an authoritative source informs Tenable.io that
the asset has been decommissioned. Currently, AWS (via the AWS Connector) is the only authoritative source used for
this purpose, but other sources such as unlinked agents and other cloud providers will be added over time.
For customers with even a small volume of dynamic, short-lived assets, this licensing calculation refinement will have
a huge impact on their overall licensing needs. For example, if the customer is creating, scanning, and
decommissioning 1,000 short-lived assets per day, this would have previously used 90,000 licenses in a 90-day period.
After the licensing calculation refinement, this will only require 1,000 licenses.
Is Tenable.io Vulnerability Management pricing changing as a result of this
calculation change?
No, all pricing remains unchanged.
What will this licensing calculation change mean for my current and potential new
Tenable.io Vulnerability Management customers?
The majority of customers will see little to no change in their licensed asset counts. In no case will the change ever
result in a higher licensed asset count. A small number of customers will see their licensed asset count drastically
reduced. If one of your customers has already received a discount due to the lack of short-lived asset licensing, then
this should be revisited at renewal time.