The Collector worker node is a host machine that scans file system and SharePoint site collection hierarchies in your environment and collects access events from Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Data Insight uses this information to perform advanced reporting on the business owners of data and the access history of data. By scanning for file metadata and security descriptors, it reports on the loopholes of permissions on files and folders. The details that are captured by the Collector node also help you find stale and orphan files in the scanned data repositories.

You can have multiple Collector worker nodes attached to the Management Server for load balancing. You can configure each collector node to connect to a subset of storage devices to extract file system metadata and extract access events from these devices. Each filer or web application can have exactly one Collector node associated with it.

A Collector worker node consists of the following components: