Skip to main content

OC Collector

  • Updated

OC Collector, part of the OC platform, is a portable, executable Windows console application, designed to collect data from various infrastructure sources such as servers, virtualization platforms, cloud services and system management tools. It can run as a Windows service or started via the Windows Task Scheduler.

OC Collectors are configured via OC View in the Data sources section and also downloaded from there.

Requirements

The requirements for OC Collector are divided into two sections:

  1. Deployment requirements: Describes the system requirements, such as hardware requirements, operating system, etc., for deploying OC Collector.
  2. Data collection requirements: Describes some few key concepts and requirements in various data collection scenarios.

Deployment requirements

  • Minimum hardware requirements:
    • CPU: 2vCPU core
    • RAM: 4 GB (8 GB optimal)
    • HDD: 50 GB
    • Architecture: 64 bit
  • Supported operating systems:
    • Windows Server 2008 R2 and higher
      • Windows updates fully applied to the latest patch level
      • For Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Management Framework 3.0 is required to be installed:
        • For 2008 R2: Windows6.1-KB2506143-x64.msu
        • For 2008: Windows6.0-KB2506146-x64.msu
  • Other software / framework requirements:
    • PowerShell 3 or higher
    • .NET framework 4.6.2 or higher
  • Network requirements:
  • Application and files:
    • [DataSourceName]_OCCollector.zip
      • This is the zip file that is downloaded via OC View and contains three files:
        1. OCCollector.exe: The console application referred as OC Collector
        2. config.json: Contains information for the communication with OC View
        3. README.txt: Contains deployment instructions
    • After OCCollector.exe is executed, additionally the following files and folders are created:
      • Inventory.db: A SQLite database containing data from the latest data collection
      • Logs folder: Contains daily log files

Data collection requirements

The requirements for data collection can be divided into two parts, depending on how you want to deploy the OC Collector: Agent-based and agentless (remote collection) approaches have different requirements for data collection, especially for the credentials used while data collection.

The two approaches can also be used in combination. For instance, it is possible to have for one part of your environment agent-based collectors, and for the other part agentless ones.

The collected data is categorized in two scan levels:

  • Discovered: The data is collected via APIs, e.g. from hypervisors or cloud providers. You can think of the discovery data as a kind of metadata collected via third-party data sources, which give us an insight into the existence of the data and some information about the data. For example, if we have discovered VMs or hosts via hypervisors or virtualization platforms such as VMware vCenter or others, this data is collected via APIs from these platforms, which typically require low critical credential rights (read-only) to collect. Unfortunately, in most cases, the data at the level of the discovery scan does not provide enough information for licensing and compliance reports, information such as the software installed on these servers and devices are usually missing. Nevertheless, this data collection provides usually important licensing information about the relationship between VMs and hosts, which host clusters exist, etc.
  • Inventoried: The data is collected directly in the network via IP (range) scans or via Microsoft Active Directory. This data collection often requires a higher critical credential rights as the collector logs into these devices, such as VMs, and collects the data directly from them. If application servers such as Microsoft SQL or Microsoft SharePoint are discovered on these machines, further credentials may be required. Agent-based collectors do not require remote access to other devices, so they can run locally with less critical credentials such as gMSA or SYSTEM accounts, but more critical credentials may be required depending on the scenario. Agentless controllers inherently require higher critical credentials to remotely access other devices for data collection.

If you have any questions or if anything is unclear, please contact our support team at support@octopus.cloud.

Related articles