MAP Toolkit: Prepare the Environment - Collector Technologies
IMPORTANT: Keep checking the MAP Blog and MAP Toolkit Content Index (en-US) for updates and changes , especially after new versions of MAP are released.
MAP employs various methods for collecting data depending on which scenario is chosen. In MAP these are referred to as “Collector Technologies” as seen here:
Each scenario uses different collectors or combinations of collectors. For example, the Windows computers scenario uses WMI, but the Exchange Server scenario uses both Active Directory, PowerShell and WMI.
Note: The Active Directory collector and the Active Directory discovery method are not the same thing. The AD DS discovery only retrieves a list of host names for inventory while the Active Directory collector gathers additional in-depth info on your environment. If you choose the Active Devices scenario which uses the Active Directory collector then you must choose the AD DS discovery method as well. The Exchange Server scenario does not have this requirement.
Each collector has a predetermined set of data that it will collect which can span multiple scenarios in MAP. So, every time the WMI collector is run, regardless of which “scenario” uses that collector, it will collect all the data predetermined for that collector. And each collector will have its own firewall requirements for connectivity.
This time I will use the “SQL Server with database details” scenario for an example. It uses the SQL Native, SQL Windows, and WMI collectors. The only difference between SQL Native and SQL Windows is the credentials used when connecting to the database engine, so I will just refer to both as SQL. First MAP will run the WMI collector which gathers all the hardware, OS, services, and application information from Windows based machines. From that, MAP now knows which machines have SQL Server installed and can run the SQL collector against those machines to gather additional in-depth info directly from the database engine. As you can see, choosing this SQL Server scenario makes selecting the Windows computers scenario redundant. But that doesn’t mean MAP runs the WMI collector twice, so choosing both isn’t hurting anything either.
Note: MAP gathers a lot of basic information from the WMI collector, like SQL Server version and SQL Server edition. So it is recommended to run one scenario at a time and check the reports to see if the info you want is already collected. This will save you time and hassle gathering unnecessary credentials and making unnecessary firewall configurations.
The collectors are:
- WMI
- SSH
- VMware (using VMware web service)
- Active Directory (using Active Directory Service Interfaces)
- PowerShell (requires 2.0+)
- SQL Native, SQL Windows (using SQL Server queries)
- Oracle (using Oracle SQL queries, requires Oracle client installed on MAP machine)