Aria Automation Secure Hosts (formerly SecOps) Windows compliance scores low when compared to other host compliance scan tools

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Compliance scan scores from Aria Automation Secure Hosts may differ from other tools such as Qualys.

Example:
For a Windows 2022 host:

• Aria Automation Secure Hosts scan: 39%

• Qualys scan: 77%

Environment

Aria Automation for Secure Hosts (formerly Aria Automation for SecOps) 8.x

Cause

Aria Automation Secure Hosts currently has a scanning limitation for Windows machines:

• It scans only local group policies.

• It does not scan the HKey Registry, where some compliance settings reside.

As a result, certain issues requiring registry-based validation are not detected, leading to lower overall compliance scores.

Resolution

 

This limitation is acknowledged and currently unresolved, as results are compared against the out-of-the-box benchmarks provided.

Workaround:

Use another scanning tool (e.g., Qualys) to generate compliance results, then import these results into Aria Automation Secure Hosts to establish a benchmark. The benchmark can then be used for compliance scanning.