About gathering security information

The ESM console obtains information about the security of the computers and the servers in the enterprise from the managers on the network. The managers gather this information from their registered agents during policy runs.

The ESM console can connect to multiple managers. If the connections in your environment involve all managers of an enterprise, the console gathers the level and the average score for the entire enterprise. The ESM console gathers this information in the following ways:

When the ESM console initially connects with a manager during a session, it retrieves domain, agent, and summary data from the manager.
When you use the ESM console to start a policy run, the following events occur:
- The participating agents run security checks on the agent computers
- The manager is updated with the results.
- The manager updates the ESM console.
  
  In this instance, you can decide if you want the ESM console to auto-navigate the enterprise tree and to view the report data.
When changes to managers and agents occur on the ESM console, do the following to ensure that the ESM console displays the current information:
- Right-click a node at the domains level and click Update to update the summary information.
- Right-click a node at the regions level and click Retrieve Summaries to retrieve the summary information from all of the managers in a region.