How does remote collector works?

[Isayani]

I am unclear about the role of remote collector.

How does remote collector works? Does it talks/transmits data to internal collector? What is the data flow?

Thanks,

-isayani

[admin]

Hi Isayani

Welcome to the communites.

Remote Collectors allow you to scan separate parts of your network by themselves and then send the results back to your central installation. .

Yes its collect data and transmit to centeral locatio.

"Life is never easy for those who dream"

[Isayani]

Hi aarav,

Thank you. Therefore, I would think remote collector is only for collection information. Local collector will merge/process the info from remote collectors.

And for any add-on adapter, it resides on local collector, am I right?

isayani

[jddias]

Adapters are installed on the server and pushed to collectors during install.

[Isayani]

Hi Jddias,

Thank you. Correct me if I read it wrong.

There are a set of adapte- instances in each remote/local collector, right?

How the information get integrated? in a module other than adapters? I thought adapter should integrate those info from all related collectors.

isayani

[jddias]

That's correct, you create an adapter instance for each collector.  The metrics collected are processed (analytics performed) by the vC Ops server.  It is not the job of the adapter to perform analytics on the data.

[Isayani]

Hi Jddias,

Great! It's clear about how it functions.

Well, In practical world, I can image we can have 2 remote collectors, each responsible for 30 VMs, doing the same things as local collector.

For storage, I may have 2 remote collectors, each  for 10 arrays, doing the same things as local collector.

Will it be possible to have 2 remote collectors, each for 10 disks or 10 LUNs?

My questions is what is the finest granuality for collector to monitor. What requirements is needed to be the a finest unit to monitor?

Thanks,

isayani

[jddias]

This is the point in the conversation where I have to ask - "What are you trying to accomplish with the remote collector?"

I suppose if you wanted to monitor a single server you could do that with the remote collector, so it's not a question of granularity.  Frankly, if I only had a few systems to monitor from a remote location and firewalls, latency and bandwidth weren't an issue I would probably just use the server's collector to do that work.

[Isayani]

Hi Jddias,

I am trying to figure out what remote collectors can do for us.

What are it functionalities, and what are the differences between local and remote.

When it come to divide the resources to remote or local collectors, I got this last questions.

I think there should be a guide line for this, shouldn't it?

Thank you. You have answer most of my doubts.

isayani

[jddias · Accepted solution]

Isayani,

  It was stated earlier in this thread - a primary use case for the remote collector is to gather metrics from an environment that is seperated by either logical or physcial networking complexity.  For example, a DMZ where you only want to open a minimum of connections internally or at a distant location where you have limited network connectivity and would like to consolidate collections to conserve bandwidth.

  You may also choose to add another collector if your vC Ops server is resource constrained.  However, based on the size environment you used in your example, there would be no benefit and only added complexity of having multiple collectors.

[Isayani]

Thank you. Got it. Pretty clear.

isayani