A discovery scan runs Nmap along with a few service specific modules to identify the systems that are alive and to find the open ports and services. Since the discovery scan mostly leverages Nmap, you can specify additional Nmap options to customize the scan. For example, if you want to change the scanning technique, you can provide the Nmap command line option for the technique that you want to use, and the discovery scan applies those settings instead of the default ones. For more information on Nmap options, visit the
Nmap documentation.
When you set up a discovery scan, you can enable or disable certain phases of a scan. For example, you can bypass the port scanning phase and move onto version detection, or you can scan each host individually to accelerate the import of hosts into the project. Additionally these settings let you choose the ports, the target services, the scan speed, and the scan mode.