Arctera Insight Information Governance Installation Guide

About the Collector

The Collector (Audit Pre-processor) is a Information Governance process that enables you to collect and parse access events from various storage repositories. The Collector examines the access events available on these storage systems to parse the events that report the read, write, create, delete, and rename activity on files or folders. The access events are processed in batches that consist of several thousand events. Each batch of events that are collected in a cycle is stored in a separate file with appropriate timestamp that indicates the ending time of the last entry in that batch. This data is pruned based on exclude rules or events that are not from the configured shares, site collections or equivalent data sources, and is then segregated on a per-share basis. These files are periodically shipped to the appropriate Indexer node.

In Information Governance, a Collector Pool is a logical grouping of collector nodes designed to scan data sources and collect access events efficiently. Managing collectors as a pool ensures better scalability, balanced load distribution, and high availability. If one collector node in the pool goes down, the others continue processing to avoid disruption. Collector Pools also simplify administration, as configuration can be applied at the pool level, ensuring consistency across collectors and enabling reliable handling of large-scale data collection.

Information Governance collects information about access events from various storage repositories through exposed vendor APIs.

For detailed information about which audit service is appropriate for your data source, see the Arctera Insight Information Governance Administrator's Guide.