Data Collectors

The data collector (DC) is the software component that monitors your devices for change and retrieves configurations. Your SIP deployment must have a minimum of one data collector. For geographic or scalability reasons, your deployment may have multiple data collectors. Each device that you monitor or manage with SIP uses a single data collector for configuration retrieval.

Data collectors in the FireMon ecosystem serve a number of functions. The DCs communicate directly with the devices that are configured within FireMon, parse the result, and pass data to the application server (AS) to be written to the database (DB).

Some of the functions performed by the DC includes:

  • Managing device configuration retrieval

  • Process traffic logs from the device or central syslog server (CSS) to extract data usage

  • Process change logs to detect device changes

Data collectors use device packs to communicate with the configured devices. The device packs provide the commands to collect the configuration and parse other logs.

Data collector communication

The DC communicates directly with the devices using ports and protocols appropriate for each individual device. HTTPS communication (tcp/443) is used to relay information back to the AS to be stored in the DB. This process requires a significant amount of configuration data that is provided by the AS.

In the even that the DC loses communication to the AS, the DC will revert to a cached, local copy of the device inventory and other configuration items. The configuration and inventory information is encrypted within the cache in a proprietary format. Until communication with the AS is reestablished, the DC will continue to communicate with the devices, retrieve configurations, and parse logs as available. All data will be held to the capacity of disk space in readiness for communication to resume.

When communication returns, the data will be passed to the AS to be stored and made available via the web interface.

When you add a new data collector, a new data collector group will also be created. It will have a system generated name of : <Data Collector Name>-Group and a description of: Generated automatically from <Data Collector Name> first time registration.

Location of data collector reports

The location of all data collector reports was moved from /var/log/firemon/dc to /var/log/firemon/dc/reports in order to remove visual clutter and make it easier to explore the files.

Permission Requirements

A user will need to be a member of a user group with the following minimum permissions granted:

  • Administration: Data Collectors

  • Module: Administration

You must have at least Read permission granted to view data collector information.

Open the Data Collectors List

  • To view a list of data collectors, click System > Data Collectors.