What are the advantages of the collector service?

Utilizing the collector service offers the following advantages:

1. Communication between the collector and the agents can automatically be encrypted
2. Communication between the collector and the agents can automatically be compressed
3. ODBC drivers do not need to be installed on the monitored hosts
4. The agents no longer communicate with the respective service (e.g. database, email server), which often increases security
5. All data is cached (and resent) during network outages between the collector and an agent. Without the collector, only log and compliance data is cached during network outages between an agent and the database
6. The collector can automatically push configuration updates to a remote host in the background
7. The collector can automatically push agent updates to a remote host in the background