11.2 Understanding the Collection Role

If you want to improve information roll‑up access for a group of devices to minimize traffic to the ZENworks Primary Server that is hosting the ZENworks database, you can enable the Collection role on a device. For example, if you have devices that are rolling up information to a Primary Server outside of their network segment, you can minimize network traffic by enabling the Collection role on a device within the network segment to accept the information from the other devices in that segment. That Collection role device is then the only device from that segment that is rolling up information to the Primary Server.

You can enable the Collection role on any managed device. The Collection role requires only the Collection role module that is installed with the ZENworks Agent. The module is inactive until you enable the Collection role on the managed device.

When you enable a Collection role on a device, you can assign any ZENworks Primary Server as its parent server. The Collection role device uploads information only to its parent Primary Server. If the parent Primary Server is not a child of another Primary Server, it writes the information directly to the database. If the parent Primary Server is a child of another Primary Server, it passes the information up to its parent Primary Server, which writes the information to the database.

A Satellite with the Collection role collects inventory information, messages (errors, warning, informational, and so forth), and policy and bundle statuses, then rolls that information up to its parent Primary Server, which in turn either writes to the database directly or passes the information to its parent Primary Server, which does the database writing. The role includes a roll-up schedule that you can edit.

To redirect collection roll-up from the satellite to a different server, configure the PreferredCollectionRollUpServer registry key. This will re-route the collection roll-up to an alternate Primary Server that you can rely on temporarily instead of the configured Parent Primary server.To assign a different primary server for collection roll-up, create the PreferredCollectionRollUpServer registry key. This key specifies the alternate server that will be used for collection roll-up. For more information, see PreferredCollectionRollUpServer in the ZENworks Registry Keys Reference.

On the managed device, the Collection module is inactive until you promote the managed device to be a Satellite with the Collection role or until the Collection role is added to an existing Satellite.