You can control the communication between the sensors installed on your assets and Carbon Black Cloud. The sensors can connect either directly to the Cloud or through a Sensor Gateway.

Consider using the Sensor Gateway in the following cases:
  • You operate a tightly controlled environment and want to ensure that your workloads are secure and not directly exposed to Internet traffic.
  • To remove the burden of owning, managing, and budgeting for additional proxy servers.
  • When you have network environments where sensor communication with the Carbon Black Cloud is not possible due to corporate policy or compliance requirements.

The Sensor Gateway has a registration mechanism that allows for communication only when registered with Carbon Black Cloud. It uses the API key mechanism to make sure that no rogue Sensor Gateway servers can initiate communication with the Cloud.

Carbon Black Cloud supports Sensor Gateway deployment as an OVA. When deploying the OVA, you can use either the vSphere Client or the ESXi Web Client. For details, see Install Sensor Gateway as an Appliance.

The Carbon Black Cloud console triggers notifications for Sensor Gateway server failure conditions, such as reaching maximum connections or resource capacity, or if the Sensor Gateway is down.