During the discovery process ActiveNav Cloud, metadata about containers and objects is recorded by the collectors. This metadata includes information such as the date of creation, date of modification, and the size of the object. When ActiveNav Cloud performs a subsequent discovery on the same data source, it compares the metadata values returned by the repository with the ones from the previous discovery. If there are any differences, the platform identifies that the object has changed and triggers the feature extraction process.
In certain cases, repositories may provide different metadata values even if the content of an object remains unchanged. This is typically observed as a difference in the object's size. Since it is difficult to determine whether this change is due to a modification in the object's content or some other variation, ActiveNav Cloud relies on conducting feature extraction to ensure accurate reporting.