Introduction

Refocus makes it easy for users to understand the real-time status of their systems. To date, achieving this has required users to develop API integrations in order to push Samples into Refocus. This process had a few limitations: it required developers to write API integrations, and, at times, meant teams had to operate their own always-on service.

Collectors are designed to tackle these issues and make it easier than ever to leverage all the capabilities of Refocus!

So, what is a Collector?

A Collector is an out-of-the-box application, running outside of Refocus, which collects data from different data sources and sends Samples to Refocus. It does this by leveraging user-provided config files called a “Sample Generators”.

Collectors are meant to be shared so if there are already a couple of Collectors running in your environment, you can just keep adding new Sample Generators without necessarily deploying new Collectors.

Data Pipeline with Collectors

Tell me more about Sample Generators

To use a simple analogy, Collectors are akin to the human body, they do the heavy lifting, but everybody (and indeed every body!) needs a brain in order to tell it what to do. The Sample Generator is that brain.

Sample Generators can run on any Collector (as long as the Collector has access to the remote data source(s). Changes to a Sample Generator don't require any admin intervention--no application deploys or restarts or anything like that--so it's fast and easy to get your data into Refocus.

Each Sample Generator provides a path to your target data source, a set of subjects and aspects that you want to send samples for, and other context variables used by the transform code to generate samples.

As illustrated above, the transform code uses context variables you provide in your Sample Generator. Just select the right Sample Generator Template for your data source and specify your context data.

Note: If there is no Sample Generator Template for your data source, writing a new Sample Generator Template involves some configuration and a little bit of Javascript to write the transform function. We'll be providing some tooling to help with that... stay tuned!

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