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Collecting Data Stored in an External Application

Connector / Collector terminology:

  • Connector - The collection of features, components and capabilities that comprise File Access Manager support for an endpoint.

  • Collector - The “Agent” component or service in a Data Classification and or Permission Collection architecture.

  • Engine - The core service counterpart of this architecture.

  • Identity Collector - A logical component used to fetch identities from an identity store and holds the configuration, settings for that identity store, and the relations between these identities.

    The identity collector It has no “physical” manifest.

    The actual work is done by the Collector Synchronizer.

The list below describes the high level installation process required to collect and analyze data from an external application. Most of these should already be set up in your File Access Manager installation. Refer to the server Installation guide for further details.

  • Install a Data Classification central engine - One or more central engines, installed using the server installer

  • Install a Permission Collection central engine - One or more central engines, installed using the server installer

  • Create an Application in File Access Manager - In the File Access Manager website, (Admin > Applications). The application is linked to central engines listed above.

Crawler Responsibilities

The crawler works with native API calls that communicate with the domain controller and the DFS namespace servers.

The crawler:

  • Creates the DFS resources tree

  • Creates mapping between the DFS links resources and physical applications resources.

  • The crawler can only map DFS links to physical shares in the File Access Manager database. Therefore, before the DFS crawler runs, the shares in the physical applications must have already been found. If a physical share is not found for a DFS link, the crawler will issue an “unfound target” warning in the task details.