The Power of Infrastructure Monitoring and ASM
The ability to continuously monitor an organization’s digital ecosystem is a foundational part of effective cybersecurity. Organizations of all sizes must maintain the ability to track and manage the performance monitoring, availability, and security of components in their hybrid environments.
Infrastructure monitoring is one way you can achieve the visibility you need to not only assess how systems within your network are performing, but optimize your infrastructure proactively. If something breaks, such as a server or a website, this network monitoring software helps detect the issue.
The value traditional infrastructure monitoring delivers can be significantly enhanced with an Attack Surface Management solution that is powered by leading internet intelligence.
ASM’s continuous, contextualized discovery and monitoring of all external-facing assets provides organizations with an attacker’s point of view of their attack surface. With this insight, security teams can more effectively address exposures and secure what they own.
Key Benefits of Infrastructure Monitoring:
- Real-Time Performance Tracking: Infrastructure monitoring provides continuous insight into system health, allowing teams to catch potential issues like slow response times, downtime, or resource overloads before they impact the user experience.
- Security Threat Detection: Some infrastructure monitoring tools can detect unusual activity or configurations, which might indicate a potential security risk, helping to mitigate threats early on.
- Improved System Reliability: Regular application monitoring ensures that IT infrastructure components run efficiently, leading to better overall performance and fewer unexpected disruptions.
- Faster Incident Response: Alerts and notifications from a monitoring solution enable security teams to react quickly to problems, reducing the time it takes to diagnose and resolve incidents.
How Infrastructure Monitoring Works
Infrastructure monitoring refers to the process of collecting data from various IT infrastructure elements like servers, virtual machines, and databases to analyze infrastructure metrics, generate alerts, and ensure reliable operations.
An effective infrastructure monitoring tool will collect this data continuously, so that organizations always have a current view of internet-facing infrastructure.
Data Collection: Network monitoring tools first gather real-time data from various components of the infrastructure, such as servers, networks, applications, and cloud environments. This can be done through agent-based monitoring (installed on systems) or through agentless monitoring (like API calls or network scanning).
Alerting: If an issue or anomaly is detected, the monitoring system generates alerts. These alerts can be customized to notify the right teams through email, dashboards, or integrations with ticketing systems, helping them respond quickly.
Reporting and Visualization: Infrastructure monitoring tools provide detailed reports and customizable dashboards that display key metrics and historical trends, allowing teams to track performance over time and plan improvements.
The Evolution of Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring has evolved significantly over the years, shifting from manual, reactive methods to highly automated, proactive systems. In the past, monitoring was often limited to on-premise servers and focused on basic metrics like uptime and CPU usage. It also involved IT teams manually addressing issues.
With the rise of cloud computing, distributed architectures, and DevOps practices, monitoring tools have expanded to cover dynamic, hybrid environments and microservices.
Today’s tools provide application performance monitoring, real-time data, machine learning, and predictive analytics to detect potential issues before they escalate, offering deeper insights into system and infrastructure performance.
Modern monitoring also emphasizes seamless integration with automation tools, enabling faster incident response and more efficient resource management. Infrastructure monitoring has further expanded to include monitoring in cloud infrastructure, such as those in AWS, Azure, and Google.
Agent vs. Agentless Infrastructure Monitoring
Agent-Based Monitoring: This approach uses little “helpers” that are installed on the things you’re watching (like servers or devices). These helpers, called agents, are small software programs installed directly on each system.
Agentless Monitoring: This approach checks in on things without needing to be inside them. It gathers information from the outside using methods like network scans, APIs (like cloud service connectors), or logging into the system remotely. Agentless monitoring is typically easier to deploy, especially for large or distributed IT environments.
Censys supports an agentless approach to infrastructure monitoring. The visibility Censys provides doesn’t require installing anything on the systems it monitors. Rather, Censys uses internet-wide scanning and other external methods to gather data about an organization’s assets—like identifying open ports, SSL certificates, cloud infrastructure, and potential vulnerabilities.
Complete Visibility with Attack Surface Management
Infrastructure monitoring and Attack Surface Management are closely related. Infrastructure monitoring focuses on tracking and observing the performance, health, and availability of an organization’s IT systems, like servers, networks, and applications.
Attack Surface Management builds on this by identifying and managing all external-facing assets associated with these systems that could be targeted by attackers, including any hidden or unmonitored systems.
While infrastructure monitoring helps ensure that systems are running smoothly, ASM extends this by continuously discovering, assessing, and securing those systems against potential threats.
Together, they help organizations optimize their infrastructure monitoring platform for both operational efficiency and cybersecurity.
Why ASM Is Critical
Without the support of Attack Surface Management, infrastructure monitoring faces several critical challenges due to lack of comprehensive visibility. These challenges can significantly increase your risk of cyber threats.
Inability to Discover All Assets: Traditional monitoring tools aren’t focused on asset discovery, especially the discovery of internet-facing assets like shadow IT, misconfigured cloud services, and new infrastructure spun up by different departments. Many organizations aren’t aware of up to 80% of their external attack surface. This results in critical exposures that attackers can exploit, while your team remains unaware.
Manual and Disparate Monitoring: Infrastructure visibility often requires the use of multiple tools—vulnerability scanners, cloud dashboards, and asset inventories—which can be siloed and incomplete. This patchwork approach makes it hard to get a unified, up-to-date view of your infrastructure and its vulnerabilities, leading to missed exposures.
Inaccurate or Infrequent Updates: Without automated, real-time monitoring, changes between updates (e.g., new cloud instances, changes in certificates) lead to missed visibility. Assets that are exposed today may remain unnoticed until the next scan, which can be too late. Attackers often exploit this delay to breach systems that are temporarily exposed.
Complex Cloud Environments: As organizations adopt cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), assets become ephemeral, dynamically changing, and harder to track. Without robust cloud connectors that continuously sync and update these assets, your visibility into cloud exposures becomes limited.
Limited Threat Prioritization: Without an ASM tool to contextualize vulnerabilities in real-time, security teams struggle to prioritize threats based on actual risk. Prioritization is critical, as some vulnerabilities are actively exploited by ransomware groups, but without comprehensive data, teams may waste resources on less critical issues.
Misaligned Security Operations: Because many traditional tools don’t integrate well, security teams end up manually correlating data across platforms. This delay makes it harder to quickly respond to vulnerabilities, lengthening the time attackers have to exploit them.
Better Together
Together, network monitoring infrastructure and ASM provide visibility into both the operational performance and security risks of an organization’s IT landscape. For example, Censys customers can seamlessly integrate Censys ASM with their existing Splunk environments. Censys ASM data can be used for alerting and creating dashboards in Splunk.
Providing Proactive Defense
This combination ensures that systems are not only functioning properly, but that vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated before attackers can exploit them.
How Censys ASM Enhances Infrastructure Monitoring
Censys is a leading provider of Attack Surface Management, which supports a security team’s infrastructure monitoring strategy. It continuously scans the internet to find and monitor all the systems (like servers, websites, and databases) that a company owns or uses. This helps organizations discover hidden or forgotten assets (like old servers or unsecured cloud infrastructure), identify weaknesses, and quickly fix them before threat actors can take advantage.
Censys leverages its proprietary internet intelligence to provide real-time visibility by continuously updating the asset inventory and tracking changes, ensuring nothing goes unnoticed. In short, Censys helps companies see all their internet-connected systems and protect them from threats, making it a critical tool for monitoring and securing infrastructure.
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Why Organizations Choose Censys ASM
Censys is trusted by the U.S. Government and more than 50% of the Fortune 500 to provide complete, accurate, and up-to-date visibility into attack surfaces.
- Comprehensive Asset Discovery: Censys offers unmatched visibility into internet-facing assets by continuously scanning the internet, identifying hosts, domains, certificates, and services, even those that may be hidden or forgotten.
- Real-Time Updates and Accuracy: With daily updates and scanning of assets, including cloud environments, Censys ensures that organizations always have the most up-to-date view of their attack surface, reducing the risk of missing exposures.
- Unmatched Internet Intelligence: Leveraging the most comprehensive internet-wide data, Censys provides insights that go beyond traditional monitoring, using advanced attribution techniques to accurately map assets to an organization.
- Cloud and Hybrid Environment Coverage: Censys integrates seamlessly with AWS, GCP, and Azure, offering continuous visibility into fast-changing cloud assets, ensuring complete coverage across on-premise and cloud environments.
- Risk Prioritization and Actionable Insights: Censys doesn’t just uncover assets; it provides context and prioritizes risks based on vulnerabilities and exposure, helping teams focus on the most critical security gaps.
- Ease of Integration and Automation: Censys ASM easily integrates with existing security tools, providing actionable intelligence that fits into established workflows, helping teams respond more quickly and effectively.
These features give customers the visibility and control needed to proactively manage their attack surfaces and mitigate risks.
“Getting Censys is like getting brand new glasses; we can see stuff in the distance, and we’ve realized how much of a difference it was. We have a greater picture beyond just doing things manually.”
– Senior Security Analyst, European Government Agency
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Secure Infrastructure Starts with Censys
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