How to organise hosts/assets in an enterprise-friendly way?

Hi all,

I’m currently trying to come up with an “enterprise-friendly” way to organise my hosts. I’m well aware of (super) groups, permissions, roles and object ownership but I’m struggling to put it all together.

How do I organise a 1000+ hosts properly to map them to departments, teams and admins - all with their corresponding sets of permissions to view/edit/execute?

Can this be done using the Community Edition or does the Enterprise Edition provide some additional features to accomplish this? Or maybe am I looking at this problem all wrong and the Greenbone use case is totally different from what I’m trying to set up?

I’d appreciate any insights or real world examples if there are any!

Cheers
David

Hi David,
still there?

I face the same problem and would be quite interested if you found a solution.

Cheers and a great start to 2025
Markus

Hi Markus,

unfortunately I wasn’t able to map Greenbone’s data structure to my needs. I ended up running all the scans from a single account and sharing everything read-only with my team members.

I kind of got around the whole problem by exporting all the findings via python-gmp and bringing them into our Checkmk site where I can set up alerts, visibility and everything according to our internal structures.

But in terms of an Greenbone-only solution I’m sorry to disappoint.

Cheers
David

Hello David,
thanks for your response.

This still helps, as I can stop searching for a greenbone-only solution with more peace of mind.

Cheers
Markus

1 Like

For anyone wondering how to get around this:
solution was to

  1. setup one web-admin via the greenbone ~cli interface
  2. login to web with that web-admin
  3. setup more users (e.g. user-specific-logins)
  4. create a group e.g. see-all-objects (note this needs to be a special group
  5. for each users-specific-login repeat 5.X
    5.1. enter details page for the user-specific-login
    5.2. copy GUID out of URl https://example.com/user/
    5.3. Go to permissions https://example.com/permissions
    5.4. add a new permission
    Name: Super (has super access)
    Subject: Group “see-all-objects”
    Resource Type: User
    user ID:
  6. Add all users to the group see-all-objects
  7. Logout of web-admin
  8. Login to one user-specific-login
  9. setup & run a scan
  10. logout & login with different user-specific-login
  11. see all the created assets/reports/etc.

Background: this works, because the users that are the owners of the tasks/targets/assets/etc. are NOT ~system-admins (as the web-admin) is
And stuff owned by ~system-admins is not visible to ~lower tier admins aka. admins created via the web-interface.
Therefore: modus operandi: use the cli-created accounts only for setup of user-accounts, but not for anything else.

Worked for me with Greenbone OS 22.04.28 - BASIC

Cheers, Markus

P.S. helpful forum posts

https://forum.greenbone.net/t/configuration-of-new-users-in-the-greenbone-security-assistant/14245/4
and some doc

@justAName

I am using my own scripts with openvas to handle scans. no need to use gui..

Eero

Meanwhile is there a product, called:

OpenVAS Report: You can use for you Asset-Management.

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