As of Minion Enterprise 2.4, you can now define collection zones. A collection zone is a grouping of servers to be used in a scale-out scenario.

For example, if you're managing 1,000 servers with Minion Enterprise, you can split the collectors on to several servers, and still point back to the same Minion repository. Without collection zones, you'd be in danger of duplicating work: every SLA on each collection server would pull all of the servers for that SLA. That is to say, if you run a Gold collection, and you have 200 servers in the Gold SLA, each one of the collectors will collect data for all 200 gold servers. This is unnecessary and could create quite a bit of duplication in your repository.

However, if you split those 200 gold servers into (for example) 10 different zones, then each collector can become a zone, and it will collect data for only the servers in its zone.

Any given collection server can collect data for as many zones as you like. The collection zone is specified in the configuration file: C:\MinionByMidnightDBA\Includes\UserConfig.ps1 In this file you’ll find a variable line that looks like this:

$Zone = 0;

Zone 0 is the default; all servers start in this same zone, their data being collected from a single collector server. This will be the case for most scenarios. NOTE: It’s important to note that the $Zone variable must match the CollectionZone value in dbo.Servers for the servers you want to collect.

You can specify that a collection server can collect for more than one zone by specifying the following in the config file above:

$Zone = "1, 3, 4, 6";

For the above variable declaration, you must mark servers in the dbo.Servers for CollectionZone 1, 2, 4, and 6. The current collector server will collect for every server in each of those zones.