---
title: "Scheduled Scans"
canonical: https://trickest.com/glossary/scheduled-scans
description: "Scheduled scans run discovery or vulnerability checks automatically on a recurring timetable so coverage stays current without someone launching each run."
---

# Scheduled Scans

Scheduled scans run on a clock rather than on demand. You define a cadence, hourly, nightly, or weekly, and the platform launches the same discovery or vulnerability check each cycle without anyone pressing a button. The value comes from comparing runs: when each pass writes its results, you diff against the last one and the deltas show what appeared, changed, or vanished since you last looked.

This matters because an attack surface drifts constantly. A team spins up a subdomain, a cloud bucket goes public, a service exposes a new port, and a one-time scan goes stale the moment it finishes. A recurring schedule keeps the picture honest and shrinks the window in which a new exposure sits undetected.

Scheduled scans are the engine behind [continuous monitoring](/glossary/continuous-monitoring) and a building block of broader [security automation](/glossary/security-automation). They turn a [vulnerability scanning](/glossary/vulnerability-scanning) job from a project into a habit, and they fit naturally into [workflow orchestration](/glossary/workflow-orchestration) where each scheduled run feeds enrichment and alerting downstream.

In a Trickest workflow you attach a cron schedule to a graph, so discovery, resolution, and probing fire on their own and only genuinely new findings page the team, instead of someone rerunning the same job by hand.

---
_Markdown source of https://trickest.com/glossary/scheduled-scans._