Collectors can be thought of as an infinitely running background jobs. They constantly run within a set interval then collect data from sources such as GitLab, Jira etc., to transform the data into useable information the backend API can understand.
### What kind of collectors do I need?
It depends on what the team uses for source data (GitLab, Jira etc.). For example, a team could be using a Jira board at a certain hosted Jira domain, and source code management using GitLab at a certain GitLab hosted domain. Therefore, the team would need one collector running for each domain.
### What collectors do I need?
The number of collectors depends on the tools your team uses for source data, like GitLab or Jira. For each domain (e.g., a Jira board or GitLab instance), you need one collector.
### How many collectors do I need?
It depends on how many domains exist. For example, we could have two running instances of a gitlab-scm-collector if there are two running hosted servers for GitLab in an organization. For more information on how to setup collector, please consult the [Collector Environmental Variables](#collector-environmental-variables) section.
The number of collectors is determined by the number of domains. For example, two running instances of a gitlab-scm-collector may require two instances of the GitLab collector. For details refer to the [Collector Environmental Variables](#collector-environmental-variables) section below.
