Devices

The Devices page is your inventory of the physical and virtual machines Cert-IX tracks for your organization — workstations, servers, mobile devices, and network equipment. Rather than a static spreadsheet, it is a living view: most devices are discovered and kept up to date automatically by a lightweight scanner agent you run inside your network, so the record reflects what is actually installed and running right now.

This page covers how devices get into the inventory, what each device record holds, and how to manage those records over their lifecycle.

How devices enter the inventory

There are three ways a device becomes an asset in Cert-IX. Agent-based discovery is the recommended path because it keeps the record continuously current with no manual upkeep.

Agent-based discovery (recommended)

Deploy the Bitcollector scanner agent on your internal servers and workstations for continuous, near-real-time asset discovery and telemetry. Bitcollector is a small agent you install on each host; it registers itself with the platform and then streams telemetry on an ongoing basis.

1. Download the agent from downloads.cert-ix.com and choose your target platform (Linux, macOS, or Windows).
2. Configure it with your Tenant ID — found in the dashboard under Settings → Organization — so the agent reports into the correct account.
3. Start the agent. It registers automatically and the host appears in your inventory, typically within about a minute, with its telemetry already populated.

Once running, Bitcollector reports the host's live state — see What the agent collects below. All telemetry is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and streamed through the platform's Kafka-based ingestion pipeline.

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Agent-based discovery is the most reliable way to keep an accurate inventory: because the agent reports continuously, records stay in sync as software is installed, ports open, or a host goes offline — without anyone re-scanning or re-entering data.

For step-by-step install instructions and configuration options, see the Agent Deployment Guide and the Agent Configuration Reference.

Manual entry

For devices you cannot (or do not want to) run an agent on — a piece of network hardware, an appliance, or an off-network machine — you can add a record by hand. You provide the device's identifying and organizational attributes (such as name, device type, owner, and location). Structured fields are validated on entry, so identifiers like IP and MAC addresses must be well-formed before the record is saved.

Manually entered devices carry the attributes you supply but do not receive live telemetry, since no agent is reporting from them.

Network discovery

Scanner agents can also surface devices they observe on the network rather than devices they are installed on. Bitmapper maps network topology and Bitscanner probes hosts for vulnerabilities; devices they identify can be reviewed and promoted into your inventory. This is useful for finding hosts that are not yet running Bitcollector. See Scanner Agents for how the agents fit together.

What the agent collects

When Bitcollector runs on a host, it reports a focused set of telemetry that the platform turns into the device record:

Telemetry	What it captures
System information	Operating system and version, plus basic hardware and host details
Software inventory	Installed packages and applications on the host
Running processes	Processes active on the machine
Open ports	Listening ports and the services exposed on them
Performance metrics	Resource utilization and host health indicators

This telemetry is what makes the device record meaningful: the software inventory feeds vulnerability correlation, the open-ports view highlights exposed services, and the performance and online/offline signals drive the health picture below.

The device record

Selecting a device opens its detail view. A record combines the live telemetry reported by the agent with the organizational attributes you assign:

• Identity — hostname, device type, and the agent's unique registration.
• System — operating system, version, and host details.
• Software — the installed-software inventory, which links through to vulnerability correlation.
• Network exposure — open ports and listening services.
• Health — online/offline status and resource utilization drawn from the agent's performance metrics.
• Security — open vulnerability findings and when the host was last assessed.
• Ownership — owner, location, and any labels you apply for organizing the inventory.

Device types

Cert-IX tracks devices across the categories you would expect in a mixed environment:

Category	Examples
Endpoints	Windows, macOS, and Linux workstations and laptops
Servers	Physical and virtual servers, including database and application hosts
Mobile devices	Smartphones and tablets
Network devices	Routers, switches, firewalls, and access points

Endpoints and servers are the natural fit for the Bitcollector agent. Network devices and appliances that cannot run an agent are typically added manually or surfaced through network discovery.

Vulnerability visibility

Each device's software inventory is correlated against Cert-IX's CVE database by the Bitscanner agent, so known vulnerabilities on a host surface directly on its record. Findings are ranked by severity — Critical, High, Medium, and Low — with remediation guidance for each.

The device view shows the open findings for that specific host; the Vulnerability Management surface aggregates findings across every asset so you can prioritize and track remediation organization-wide.

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Vulnerability findings reflect the software the agent last reported. Keeping Bitcollector running ensures new packages — and any vulnerabilities they introduce — are picked up without a manual re-scan.

Monitoring and health

Because Bitcollector reports continuously, the inventory reflects each host's current state. A device shows as online while its agent is reporting and offline when it stops. Resource-utilization and host-health indicators come from the agent's performance metrics, giving you a live sense of which machines are healthy, degraded, or unreachable.

Continuous monitoring depends on the agent running on the host. Manually entered devices and hosts without an agent will not report live status.

Compliance hardening

The Bitenforcer agent evaluates hosts against recognized hardening benchmarks — including CIS, STIG, and PCI-DSS — so you can see how a device measures up to a configuration baseline and where it drifts. Benchmark results feed into the broader compliance tracking, which is a Beta capability. See the Compliance overview for the frameworks Cert-IX helps you track.

Managing device records

Viewing and filtering

The device list supports sorting, filtering, and search so you can narrow a large inventory to what matters — for example, all servers, all offline hosts, or everything owned by a particular team. Ownership, location, and labels you set on each record give you consistent attributes to filter and organize by.

Editing

To update a device, open its record and edit its attributes. Live telemetry fields are maintained by the agent and refresh on their own; the fields you can change by hand are the organizational attributes such as owner, location, and labels. Changes to a record are tracked so you can see what was modified and when.

Archiving

Removing a device archives it rather than deleting it. Archived devices drop out of your active inventory but their history is retained, which preserves the record for audit and avoids losing context if the host later returns. This is preferable to a hard delete whenever a machine is decommissioned, replaced, or temporarily retired.

Best practices

1. Lead with agents. Deploy Bitcollector on every endpoint and server you can — it is the difference between a snapshot and a live, self-maintaining inventory.
2. Keep agents running. Continuous reporting is what keeps software inventories, open-ports views, and vulnerability findings current.
3. Add what agents can't reach. Enter network hardware and off-network devices manually so your inventory is complete.
4. Organize consistently. Set owner, location, and labels so filtering and reporting stay meaningful as the inventory grows.
5. Act on findings by severity. Work Critical and High vulnerabilities first, using the remediation guidance on each finding.
6. Archive on decommission. Archive retired hosts to keep your active list clean while preserving their history.

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Learn more

• Scanner Agents — how Bitcollector, Bitscanner, Bitmapper, and Bitenforcer work together
• Agent Deployment Guide — install and register an agent
• Software Inventory — the installed- software view fed by agent telemetry
• Vulnerability Management — prioritize and track findings across all assets