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What resources does the agent use?

The Nanitor agent is designed with these principles in mind:

  • Low memory footprint
  • No third-party dependencies
  • Low CPU overhead
  • Low network footprint. Payload is compressed JSON and we only send configuration and vulnerability changes when there has been a change.
  • Run tasks that complete quickly

The tasks that the Nanitor agent performs are the following:

  • Every five minutes sends a heartbeat to the server.
  • Every 2 hours checks vulnerability information.
  • Every hour checks the system configuration.
  • Every 6 hours check and sends system inventory to the server.
  • Every 2 hours checks patch information.
  • Every 2 hours checks firewall and AV status.

When you install the Nanitor agent you will see two services running: 1. nanitor-agent.exe (nanitor-agent on MacOS) is the Nanitor agent runner that checks on the most recent version of the Nanitor agent. It will download and install the most recent version of the Nanitor agent. 2. nanitor-agent-bin.exe (nanitor-agent-bin on MacOS) is the actual Nanitor agent that does the checks on the installed machine and reports to the Nanitor server its findings. This service is upgrading itself to the newest version by request from the Nanitor server.

The agent only communicates with the server instance it registered to during installation and only via HTTPS using TCP443. All communication is outbound and initiated by the agent. The agent will not respond to any connection attempts it did not initiate.