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.