When and how to deploy additional Auvik collectors

The Auvik collector serves as the eyes and ears of your network infrastructure remote monitoring and management system. The collector depends on Inferred connectivity to different subnets to discover and monitor your clients’ devices. In certain cases, it makes sense to deploy multiple collectors to monitor different segments of your network. There’s no additional charge to deploy more than one collector. 

You might want to deploy additional collectors in these situations:

1. You have multiple physical sites that aren’t Inferred level reachable to or from each other.
2. You have some network segments that are completely segregated from each other (either physically or logically) and you want to keep them that way.
3. You want a backup collector in case the primary collector’s host encounters issues.

We recommend you supply a description for every collector set up on a client network. This will help you better identify which collector is managing which subnet.

What happens when one collector goes offline

You can run multiple collectors on a single network for failover purposes, as long as each collector can talk to all subnets on the network. If one collector goes offline, the other will immediately take over scanning.

If you have collectors running on different subnets that aren’t able to communicate, each collector continues to manage its subnet only. In other words, if a collector for subnet A goes offline, the collector for subnet B will not take over scanning.

• Add an additional collector
• Set an additional collector to scan subnets

How to add an additional collector

When a client is first set up, you must start an Auvik collector to begin the discovery process. For an additional collector to talk to subnets the first collector doesn’t have access to, the additional collector must be installed on a host that has access to the other subnets you’d like managed.

1. Place a copy of the additional collector on the second host. This can be done in one of two ways:
   1. Copy the downloaded file from the first host to the second (and any additional).
   2. From the additional host, download another copy of the collector from the client’s Auvik dashboard.
2. Deploy your additional collector on the host machine. Let the collector initialize.
3. From the client’s Auvik dashboard, click Auvik Collectors in the side navigation bar. You should now see an additional collector entry, which appears as Connected and Pending. Approve the new collector.

How to set an additional collector to scan subnets

The initial collector will have discovered all the subnets to which it has access. But there may be other subnets you’d like managed that the initial collector can’t to talk to. An additional collector can be set to scan these other subnets.

First, add the new subnet to your client’s dashboard. Once Auvik starts scanning the subnet, you’ll be able to see which collector is managing it from the list of Routed Networks.

Collector failover and reassignment behavior

Manually assigned primary + secondary collectors

When you explicitly configure a primary collector with one or more secondary collectors, Auvik maintains the primary collector as the preferred assignment for the subnet.

If the primary collector goes offline, Auvik automatically fails over to one of the configured secondary collectors so monitoring continues uninterrupted.

Once the primary collector comes back online and is considered healthy again, Auvik automatically reassigns the subnet back to the primary collector.

This behavior ensures:

• Predictable collector ownership
• Automatic failover protection
• Automatic recovery back to the preferred collector

Automatically assigned collectors

If multiple collectors are deployed but you have not explicitly configured primary and secondary collectors, Auvik uses automatic assignment logic.

For subnets configured with Automatic assignment:

• Auvik selects a collector that can successfully communicate with (“see”) the subnet.
• If multiple eligible collectors are available, Auvik selects the oldest collector based on its creationDate.

To minimize unnecessary reassignment and data churn:

• If the currently assigned collector is still:

  • online, and
  • able to communicate with the subnet

  then Auvik keeps the existing assignment.

This means that when another collector later comes back online, Auvik does not automatically switch the subnet back if the currently assigned collector is still functioning properly.

This behavior helps provide assignment stability in environments with multiple eligible collectors.