Credentials consist of a user name and password pair used to authenticate the program to the specified target machines. By default, the program uses your currently logged on credentials to automatically log in to the target machine(s). If the current logged in user credentials do not have administrative rights on all of the target machines, you need to enter alternate credentials. The program will use these alternate credentials to automatically log on to the target machines. In all cases, credentials are stored with strong encryption techniques and are not available by anyone except the user who provided them.
If you enter <Domain>\User, the program will use the domain account rights.
If you enter <Target Machine>\User, the program will use the target's local account rights.
If you do not enter a machine or domain name, the scanner tries to use <consolemachinename>\user. If this is not successful, it will next attempt to use <remotemachinename>\user.
'.\username' will cause the scanner to prepend the remote machine's name to the user name.
There are a couple of ways to assign credentials to machines.
To apply credentials to all machines in a machine group, select Credentials > Set Credentials. Specify the appropriate credentials for the group and click OK.
To apply credentials to one or more specific machines in a machine group, select the machines and then select Credentials > Set Admin Credentials. Specify the appropriate credentials for the machines and click OK.
For more information, see Working with a Machine Group.
It is considered a best practice to always assign credentials to the machines you scan. If you don't supply credentials, the program will attempt to authenticate to machines using the default credentials. If the default credentials do not work the program will attempt to authenticate using the account credentials of the person currently logged on to the program. If those credentials do not work then the scan will fail.
One suggestion is to make your default credentials the same as the account credentials you typically use to log on to the program. This will eliminate problems that may occur if you forget to assign credentials.
The credentials you supply here will be used when accessing remote machines. The supplied credentials will not be used to authenticate to the local (console) machine. Rather, the program uses the credentials of the currently logged on user to authenticate to resources on the local machine. Therefore, in order to perform tasks on the local machine, make sure you log on using an account that has administrator and local machine access rights.