Comparing collectors and discovery tools

This topic provides a information that compares collectors and discovery tools.

What is a collector?

A collector is a data-gathering program that obtains information about system resources and passes the information to many individual passive parameters.

Collectors are always automatically scheduled to execute at regular polling intervals (usually 1 minute).

What are discovery tools?

A discovery tool is a program that finds and registers a particular class of system resource, such as finding all the file systems mounted on a specific machine.

Like collectors, some discovery tools are automatically scheduled to execute at regular polling intervals. However, if the events that a discovery tool monitors occur less frequently than the default polling interval, a discovery tool may have its own scheduling mechanism to enable it to monitor these events.

For more information about scheduling discovery and collector execution, see the PATROL Console Getting Started Guide in Related-products-and-documentation.