Tenable One empowers security teams to go beyond surface-level risk tracking and drive measurable improvements across their security programs. With unified visibility and customizable dashboards, Tenable One makes it easy to monitor the KPIs that matter most, helping teams shift from reactive firefighting to proactive, strategic exposure management.
The importance of KPIs in exposure management
Effective exposure management isn’t just about identifying risks — it’s about continuously measuring and reducing real exposure. Key performance indicators (KPIs) provide security teams with critical visibility into program effectiveness, helping them prioritize actions, monitor progress and ensure alignment with broader business objectives.
In this blog, we’ll highlight the top KPIs Tenable One customers track to reduce risk, accelerate remediation and demonstrate impact to stakeholders.
Essential KPIs for effective exposure management
1. SLA performance metrics
Tracking service level agreement (SLA) performance is crucial for understanding how consistently your organization meets its remediation targets. This provides insight into whether your security team is keeping pace with exposure management commitments or if risk is accumulating across specific asset groups.
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SLA Compliant Assets Over Time: This metric offers visibility into how well your organization is meeting its remediation goals. It highlights which areas are effectively keeping up with exposure resolution and where unresolved risks may be building up.
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Top Critical and High Detections by Number of Findings Exceeding SLA: These metrics highlight growing technical debt — findings that remain unresolved beyond their expected timelines, increasing your organization’s risk exposure. Consistent tracking allows for early detection of bottlenecks, ownership gaps, or resource constraints before they lead to larger, more challenging risks. By tracking findings approaching SLA, teams gain a proactive view, enabling them to act on critical assets — either through remediation or mitigation – before SLA breaches occur.
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Monitoring trends in these KPIs allows organizations to identify periods of declining compliance and pinpoint areas requiring immediate attention.
2. Risk posture and exposure trends
A holistic understanding of your organization’s risk posture and evolution over time is fundamental to strategic exposure management.
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Cyber Exposure Score (CES) Over Time: This metric provides a high-level view of your organization’s total risk exposure. It aggregates risk across all assets, reflecting how the attack surface evolves and whether remediation efforts are effectively reducing overall risk. Monitoring CES trends helps your security team understand the direction of their risk posture — whether it’s improving, plateauing, or worsening — and serves as a strategic signal for leadership.
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Assets Exposure Score by Exposure Category (VM, OT, Cloud, etc.): This metric allows you to compare risk posture across different technology stacks, prioritize remediation efforts and allocate resources to areas with the highest average exposure.
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CES Exposure Score by Exposure Category and Asset Type: This metric helps identify whether specific asset types within a category disproportionately contribute to cumulative risk, facilitating precise action and enabling data-driven decisions on resource allocation.
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Tracking these metrics enables data-driven decisions on resource allocation. It allows for drill-downs into contributing assets and exposure categories, ensuring your efforts are always aligned with the most critical risks.
3. Remediation KPIs
Effective remediation tracking is critical to ensuring weaknesses are not merely detected but addressed promptly and consistently. This category of KPIs focuses on measuring the efficiency of vulnerability resolution, tracking how long issues remain open and identifying potential delays or regressions.
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Findings by State Over Time: This metric illustrates the progression of findings through “Active,” “Fixed,” and “Resurfaced” states over time. It offers visibility into remediation volume, closure rates and recurring issues. A steady increase in resurfaced findings can indicate incomplete fixes or recurring vulnerabilities due to configuration drift or asset churn.
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Findings Age by Severity: This metric highlights which high-severity issues are aging without resolution, serving as a key risk indicator tied to SLA adherence.
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Average Remediation Days by Asset Type: This metric helps uncover which teams or environments take longer to remediate issues, pointing to inefficiencies or gaps in ownership.
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When tracked collectively, these metrics empower security teams to assess the speed and consistency of remediation; detect bottlenecks and high-risk delays across severity levels and asset owners; and focus remediation efforts where they are most impactful. Organizations can monitor and fix trends, investigate spikes in resurfaced findings, and benchmark asset groups based on average remediation time to drive process improvements.
Transform your exposure management with Tenable One
Tenable One provides security teams with unified, customizable risk dashboards and reports. These tools offer the actionable insights needed to track and optimize your exposure management outcomes, empowering your organization to effectively measure, manage and reduce exposure risk.
By effectively tracking these essential KPIs within Tenable One, organizations can:
- Reduce risk and prevent breaches
Make data-driven decisions to focus remediation efforts where they matter most, optimize resource allocation and proactively address critical risks before they escalate.
Identify remediation bottlenecks and ownership gaps to drive accountability, ensure timely resolution of high-risk issues and track progress to stay on target with SLA commitments.
Communicate program effectiveness and measurable improvements to stakeholders, demonstrating how security initiatives directly support business goals and reduce organizational risk.
Explore how Tenable One can empower your organization to quantify and reduce exposure risk.