2. Service Deployment and Configuration | Data Profiling and Monitoring

2.1 Activity Summary

Activity Description	This stage outlines the work that is required to progress your project plan by deploying on premise connectors, configuring them, and validating their operation.
Goals	On Premise collectors are operational. Discovery process has been validated.
Participants	Project Sponsor, IT team, Project / Application Administrator
Pre-requisites	Project Plan defined. Repository inventory prepared. Deployment architecture defined.
Outputs	Data discovery process validated. Initial users have access.

2.2 Provision Collector Hosts, Collector Groups, and Install Collectors

If the project involves discovering on-premise file share content, then the deployment plan will incorporate an appropriate number of On-Premise Collectors.

The On-Premise Collectors may be deployed to existing application servers, or you may prefer to deploy to new hosts. If using an existing server, you should consider whether the load from operation of a Collector process may impact any other applications hosted on the server.

Feature Extraction from object content can lead to heavy CPU and memory usage while retrieval of content for Feature Extraction may impact on available I/O bandwidth.

The basic steps for downloading and installing a Collector, and the considerations for the specification and security of the host application server are outlined in the Collector Installation Guide at the link below:

Collector Installation Guide

If using Collector Groups, you should configure them for your physical locations according to the deployment plan before installing Collectors. Once the Collector Groups are created, they will be assigned a unique Collector Install ID. This ID will be used to associate Collectors to a specific Group during installment.

2.3 Add Users

When your tenant is provisioned, a single administrator user will be added. You should now add additional users from your project team to allow them to assist in this deployment and configuration phase. Further users can be added at any time.

The process of adding users and the access that is associated with each available user role is outlined at the link below:

Managing Users (📺)

Users can be configured to sign in with Microsoft Entra ID account and use multi-factor authentication for added security. See below article on how to configure this for your users:

How to enable Sign in with Microsoft

2.4 Deploy Credentials

Before a Data Source can be created to validate the operation of Collectors the credentials that will be used to gain access to them must be configured within the system. You should have prepared the required credentials during the Preparation phase. If not, you should do so now to continue with the process.

The links below outline the steps to add credentials to the ActiveNav Cloud platform for different repository types.

Adding Basic Credentials

Adding Azure Credentials

Adding Google Workspace Credentials

Adding iManage Cloud Credentials

Adding iManage Work Credentials

Adding ShareFile Credentials

Adding NetDocuments Credentials

2.5 Validate Operation

At this stage, we recommend that the overall operation of the system is tested by performing Discovery and Feature Extraction on a small test location. This will allow you to confirm connectivity of your Collectors to the repositories and validity of the credentials you have prepared.

In the interest of being able to quickly confirm the end-to-end operation of the system, it is recommended that a dedicated test location is set up with a small number of files. The files should be primed with some fake data profile exceptions (e.g., document age or type) to allow the detection of data to be demonstrated.

Data Source Creation

Follow the steps in this KBA to define your test data source:
How to Create a Data Source

For testing purposes, you should ensure:

That you use a path with just a small amount of test data
That you choose “Discovery with Feature Extraction”
That you select the appropriate Collector Group for your data path

After you have saved your test Data Source configuration, you can observe it being scheduled for operation on the Data Sources page in the ActiveNav Cloud UI. A small amount of test data should take only a few minutes to process.

Confirm in the details for the data source that the expected quantity of data was discovered.

Data Visualization

To review the results from your Data Source discovery, you should open the ActiveNav Cloud UI as a user with Analyst role. This will allow you to open the Profile Dashboard where your newly discovered data will be assigned to the “No Business Unit” category.

The Profile Dashboard shows data profile breakdown by age, size and type. You can also use the Analyst Dashboard to further explore the details of the findings for specific containers / objects.

Profile Home Page

Analyst Home Page

Other Repositories / Collectors

If you have On-Premise Collectors installed in different physical locations, you may choose to run a test for each location – this will allow you to identify any variation in network connectivity that may impact on operation.

Cloud Collectors are not affected by network configuration as they are hosted within the ActiveNav Cloud platform, but credentials for cloud-based repositories should be validated as well.

2.6 Introduce Users

This is a good time to introduce Data Analysts to the application by providing them with a basic introduction to the platform and walking them through the application using the discovered test data as a case study.

Next Step

First Discovery represents the first full scale discovery of the project, or the first discovery for a specific repository type.