About Collection Agents

The Collection Agent serves a similar role as that of the Collection Station in BMC TrueSight IT Data Analytics (IT Data Analytics) with respect to data collection, but it is designed to be run on remote nodes that have existing PATROL Agents installed and running on them. Collection Agents need to be configured by installing BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics. You can configure Collection Agents on BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics in any of the following environments:

• BMC PATROL: Use the PATROL Configuration Manager for configuring Collection Agents.
• BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management: Use the BMC ProactiveNet Central Monitoring Administration Console for configuring Collection Agents.

Collection Agents can be useful in the following scenarios:

• You already have the BMC PATROL components installed in your environment.
• You have a company policy that restricts direct communication from the Collection Station to the target host. For example, if you cannot open the target host's firewall ports, the Collection Station cannot communicate with the target server.

The Collection Agent configured on BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics allows data collectors to run and collect data directly from any host that has an existing PATROL Agent. If you already have PATROL Agents deployed in your environment, then using Collection Agents can simplify the management of the data collectors. By using BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics, you do not need to manage host (or domain) user names, passwords and have as many socket connections in your environment. 

You can configure Collection Agents by using PATROL Configuration Manager or BMC ProactiveNet Central Monitoring Administration. The primary purpose of BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics is to manage the Collection Agents configured and monitor their health and status. BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics forwards information about the performance and health of the Collection Agents to PATROL Configuration Manager (or BMC ProactiveNet Central Monitoring Administration) and log data to the IT Data Analytics server.

The data collector instances running in the Collection Agents are administered using the Administration > Data Collectors tab on the IT Data Analytics user interface or CLI commands such as importcollector and exportcollector.

For more information, see Agent types .

The following figure depicts data collection using BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics (Collection Agent):

(Click the image to expand it)

Data collection using BMC PATROL for IT Data Analytics