You don't need a data collector on each appliance. Data Collection is driven by the Primary/Master Server the media server is attached to. You have to choices for data collection:
1.) Install the software locally on each Primary server.
2.) Run data Collection remotely via a designated collector (software is installed locally).
In both setups you then create a data collection Policy on the collector for every environment you are trying to collect data from. You can designate one appliance (or build a server for this purpose) to use as dedicated collector.
In your case you would be creating one policy for each NetBackup Primary (running as an appliance, BYOB, flex, etc.) You then need to create a data collection policy for each NetBackup "instance" you want to collect data from.
Difference is in how you setup/define the collection Policy on your Portal Server, type is SSH or WMI for remote or for local, NetBackup software on Data Collector Server.
So, under the designated data collector on your Portal, you would be defining different remote data collection policies like in the example below. The data collector represented by the folder as a separate policy for each NetBackup Primary Server.
Editing or looking at one of the Policies you can see it is collecting (or can if so desired) SLP, MSDP falls under Storage, Media Server falls under storage Server, etc.
Hope this helps. Documentation is not very linear or clear. Details are different depending on what documentation source you are reading.
Dana
You only need data collected from the Primary/Master Server. It has all the storage details for every Media/Storage Server it manages. The NetBackup Primary Server is key for collecting data. It exposes all data in the NetBackup environment. I would suggest you start with configuring one NetBackup Data Collector and Policy for one NetBackup Primary server, this exposes every media/storage server it uses for data collection and reporting. You get a good deal of performance metrics, storage forecasting, consumption, etc. Do some monitoring and reporting to get the look and feel of things and then roll it out more broadly. Once you get the lay of the land, if you feel you need live performance metrics in real time as opposed to past performance details which NITA happily provides, then you could enable "NetBackup Resources Monitor". It requires that the NetBackup IT Analytics Exporter to be installed on the NetBackup Primary Server and the Data Collection (as seen in the picture) to be configured.
