The VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance data collection service is a high-performance facility for collecting fault and performance data from various devices and other data sources.
The data collection provides a flexible and an extensible suite of collectors. The generic Kafka collector is one collector used to collect fault and performance data from an external Kafka bus.
| Collector Type | Description |
|---|---|
| NetFlow | Collects NetFlow vX and Sflow-compatible devices data. |
| Kafka | Collects data from an external Kafka bus. |
| Smarts Notification Collector | Collects event data from the Smart SAM server. |
| Smarts Topology Collector | Collects topology data from the Smart SAM server. |
| Smarts Metrics Collector | Collects performance data from Smart IP domain manager. |
You can create collector instances using the VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance user interface. The steps to create collector instances are described in the following sections. To collect data from the devices, the user needs to configure the collector by selecting the collector type in the Data Collector Store page. The user can provide the properties for the collector in the configuration page.
Different collectors require modified configurations. In general, the collectors require the following specifications:
- Location of the devices to monitor, such as an IP addresses and port number.
- Credentials to use when communicating with the device, such as a token or user name and password.
- How frequently data is collected (the polling interval).
