Data collectors

Not all IT management collectors are Network Management Systems (NMS). Some are agents designed to perform tests or collect data and report the results back to the NMS. These agents provide two services to the NMS: they allow distributed data collection and they offload some of the collection and aggregation work for the NMS.

Data perspective

Some data NMSs collect is perspective dependent and some is perspective independent. For example, consider an ICMP ping request sent from the NMS to a managed device. The information we retrieve at the NMS tells us the round trip time between the NMS and a managed device. If that managed device were to move to a different location across a lengthy WAN connection, the path to the device would change and so would the ping response time. Now consider a server sending log information to the   NMS. An important part of log information is the time the logged event occurred, which is recorded the timestamp field of the log message. The exact time the log server received the message is not critical. Moving a log server or log exporter will have no effect on the log data received.