Enhancing Asset Monitoring: Why Guardian Outperforms Open-Source Tools
The Challenge of Asset Visibility
In today’s dynamic IT environments, organizations struggle with the continuous process of identifying, monitoring, and managing all internet-connected assets—both internal and external. This process is also known as Attack Surface Management or ASM. Every asset, from cloud instances and IoT devices to SaaS applications and third-party APIs, presents potential attack vectors that adversaries can exploit. Organizations need real-time visibility into these assets, continuous monitoring for exposures, and automated risk management. However, achieving this with traditional open-source tools is far from sufficient.
The Limitations of Open-Source Solutions
Open-source asset discovery and vulnerability management tools such as nmap, Masscan, Zmap, OpenVAS, Shodan, and OSQuery are widely used for asset scanning and security assessments. While these tools serve specific purposes, they have significant shortcomings in holistic attack surface management:
- Nmap & Masscan: Effective for network scanning but lack persistent monitoring and asset correlation across dynamic cloud environments.
- Zmap: Fast internet-wide scanning, but lacks real-time tracking and risk assessment.
- OpenVAS: Offers vulnerability scanning but requires manual tuning and lacks automated asset inventory updates.
- Shodan: Useful for external attack surface discovery but cannot track internal assets or correlate vulnerabilities across environments.
- OSQuery: Provides real-time system monitoring but is limited to endpoint security rather than enterprise-wide asset management.
These tools operate in silos, providing fragmented visibility into an organization’s infrastructure. They require significant manual effort to correlate findings, lack automation, and often miss ephemeral assets like cloud workloads and API endpoints. Worst of all, there is no way to integrate the results obtained from these tools into a workflow and unified dashboard.
Why Codenotary's Guardian Outperforms Open-Source Solutions
Codenotary’s Guardian goes far beyond these traditional tools by offering comprehensive attack surface management with the following advantages:
- Real-Time Asset Discovery & Continuous Monitoring
- Guardian automatically identifies all internal and external assets, including cloud instances, IoT devices, and third-party integrations.
- Unlike traditional scanners, it tracks changes in real time to detect newly exposed assets or misconfigurations.
- Automated and autonomous Mitigation by AI
- Our AI identifies risks and autonomously mitigates the risk without requiring use intervention, thus freeing up valuable human resources for policy and decision making tasks
- Assigns risk scores and prioritizes critical exposures, reducing alert fatigue.
- Immutable Data Integrity & Cryptographic Attestation
- Unlike traditional asset tracking solutions, Guardian leverages blockchain-based attestation to ensure the integrity of asset records and prevent tampering.
- Provides cryptographic proof of software authenticity, ensuring that no unauthorized changes go unnoticed.
- Comprehensive Coverage Across Hybrid Environments
- Detects and tracks assets across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments in a unified dashboard.
- Identifies shadow IT and unauthorized infrastructure that could expose an organization to attack.
- Seamless Integration & Automation
- Guardian integrates directly into CI/CD pipelines, cloud security tools, and ITSM platforms for continuous enforcement of security policies.
- Automates compliance tracking and reporting, reducing manual overhead.
Conclusion
While open-source tools provide valuable security insights, they lack the automation, unified monitoring dashboards, and AI-driven insights needed for enterprise-wide attack surface management. Codenotary’s Guardian offers a far superior solution by continuously discovering, monitoring, and securing all assets—ensuring that organizations stay ahead of emerging threats with real-time intelligence and cryptographic trust.
Want to eliminate blind spots in your infrastructure? Start using Guardian today.
