When it comes to scanning your infrastructure, we have a few decisions to make, as the OpenSCAP project provides a few tools that have overlapping functions. The reason for this is that they are targeted at different audiences—some are purely command line-driven and so lend themselves extremely well to scheduled, scripted tasks such as a monthly compliance report. At the time of writing, there are a total of five OpenSCAP tools available, and we will look at each of these in more detail in the following sections to enable you to make an educated decision as to which tool (or tools) are right for your enterprise.

In the following subsection, we will start by looking at the most fundamental tool, OpenSCAP Base.