Overview

The LogicMonitor Collector is an application that runs on a server within your infrastructure and uses standard monitoring protocols to intelligently monitor devices within your infrastructure.

LogicMonitor Collectors are not agents and do not have to be installed on every resource within your infrastructure that you would like monitored. Rather, as discussed in Adding Collectors, you should install a Collector on a host in each location of your infrastructure. The Collector retrieves data from all the hosts (i.e. devices) assigned to it, then encrypts the data and sends it back to the LogicMonitor servers over an outgoing SSL connection.

One Collector can typically monitor hundreds of devices; however, this capacity depends on how many metrics are being monitored for each device, as well as the available resources of the server on which the Collector is installed. For more information on capacity, see Collector Capacity.

How Collectors Determine What Metrics to Monitor for Devices

When you add a device into monitoring, LogicMonitor applies built-in intelligence to recognize what kind of device it is. Based on the information discovered about the device, LogicMonitor DataSources are applied.

DataSources are templates that tell the Collector how to monitor the device, what metrics to collect for the device, how to display those metrics as graphs, and what values indicate issues that need attention. LogicMonitor installs with hundreds of pre-built DataSources that will automatically apply when you add devices into your account.

Collector Data Storage

All of the data from your Collectors is consolidated in a LogicMonitor data center, and this data is accessible in your LogicMonitor portal from anywhere with an internet connection. This necessitates that the server your Collector is installed on can make an outgoing HTTPS connection to LogicMonitor’s data centers (note, however, that Collectors can be installed on proxy servers).

Ports Used by Collectors

The server on which a Collector is installed must be able to able to make an outgoing HTTPS connection to the LogicMonitor servers (proxies are supported). In addition, the ports for the monitoring protocols you intend to use (e.g. SNMP, WMI, JDBC, etc.) must be unrestricted between your Collector machine and the resources you want to monitor.

The following table documents how the Collector communicates outbound traffic so that firewall rules can be configured accordingly. Additionally, it highlights the use cases in which the Collector is listening for inbound traffic and, when applicable, the configurations that can be used to update these inbound ports.

*For instructions on editing a Collector’s configurations, see Editing the Collector Config Files.

Anti-Malware Exemptions

Although the Collector has undergone rigorous security testing prior to release, its traffic patterns may look suspicious to anti-malware tools such as heuristic antivirus or intelligent endpoint detection and response services. If you elect to run such software on Collector systems, be aware that it may interfere with the Collectors operations and will require an exemption. For instructions on configuring anti-malware exemptions, see LogicMonitor Security Best Practices.

Collector Security

The LogicMonitor Collector has been carefully designed and developed with high security in mind. For details on Collector security measures and recommended best practices, see LogicMonitor Security Best Practices.