OCS Inventory NG was designed to work seamlessly in infrastructures with tens of thousands of hosts. The central management server would be overwhelmed without any doubt if it had to scan, query, and gather the inventory data from all of the hosts at the same time. That is why the developers implemented a task delegation mechanism. We explained this mechanism in a nutshell in Chapter 1, Introduction to IT Inventory and Resource Management. Basically, in order to alleviate the network load, the central server delegates the task of discovering other hosts to other clients that are known to be faithful and also the most active.
What do we mean by this? The client agents are becoming slaves of the management server. The server rates these agents based on how frequently they contact the server. These variables are called as Fidelity and Quality. We will explain these in greater detail a bit later. Right now, what matters is that the server tracks all the activities...