What to expect from a content scan

A full-site content scan processes every supported existing object of your sites regardless of when the objects were last changed. Find out which objects are supported in a scan.

This page describes how content scans are paced and what you can expect from them.

Content scans are a backfill, not a steady-state workload

Content scans are inherently large, one-time operations. A single site can contain millions of objects, and the volume processed during a content scan is much greater than the volume of ongoing edits being processed by real-time scanning. Because of this, content scans are expected to run for days to weeks, depending on the size of the sites in scope.

Content scans are also paced deliberately to keep the platform stable for all customers.

All scans make progress, regardless of overall load

Our core commitment is to advance progress for every active scan for all our customers.

This means:

• No head-of-line blocking. Your scan begins making progress as soon as possible after it is admitted, and continues to make progress alongside any other scans running in the same region. This means that a large neighboring customer can't indefinitely consume capacity at the expense of your scan.

• Steady pacing instead of bursty completion. A scan may run longer than it would in an isolated environment, but it does not stall waiting for unrelated work to finish. On average, this leads to shorter completion times for everyone

• Predictable behavior under load. When demand on the platform increases existing scans continue to advance rather than being impacted.

Near real-time scanning is not affected by full-site content scan load

Full-site content scans use a processing pipeline separate to the pipeline for near real-time scanning. Neither scan type affects the speed of the other.

What this means for planning

When planning a content scan, keep the following in mind:

• Treat the content scan as a sustained background operation.
  Begin enabling scanning ahead of any compliance milestone or audit deadline rather than immediately before it.

• If you have a specific deadline, contact your account team early.
  Together, we can discuss what timeline is achievable and how we can help.

Frequently asked questions

Can I see the progress of my content scan?
Not at the moment, but we're working on adding this.

Will my content scan be paused if another customer starts a large content scan?
No. Content scans run concurrently, and every active scan continues to make progress, regardless of scan sizes.. New work entering the system does not impact scans already in flight.

Will a content scan delay detection of new content created during the scan?
No. Real-time scanning is isolated from full-site content scan processing.

Can I make my content scan run faster?
Content scans are paced to preserve fairness across all customers. If you have a deadline that the projected scan timeline does not meet, contact your account team to review options.

What's scanned if I re-scan a site?
If you trigger a new content scan, the entire site is re-scanned. There is no partial site content scan functionality at the moment.

What is the coverage of a content scan?
Think of a full-site scan as a snapshot in time of your site. A content scan covers the current content of a site from the moment its status changes from Pending to In progress. After that, any new or modified objects aren’t covered by the content scan. Instead, we scan those objects based on the detections you set and notify you with an alert when we find something. Objects that exist in the archive or the trash are scanned. Objects that have been hard deleted are not scanned, but results from an earlier scan may still exist in the CSV scan file. The scan results cover all supported objects from a site, even if they were scanned in near-real time before you started the full-site scan.