Native Collector Guide

When should I choose the native collector?

Choose the native collector package when your monitoring workload does not depend on loading external JDBC drivers from ext-lib.

Typical native-friendly workloads include:

• HTTP, HTTPS, website availability, and API checks
• Port, ping, SSL certificate, and other network probes
• Redis, Zookeeper, Kafka, and other non-JDBC monitoring types

Why use it?

Compared with the JVM collector package, the native collector package is usually a better fit when you want:

• Faster startup
• Lower baseline memory usage
• A simpler runtime without a bundled or preinstalled JDK

What are the trade-offs?

The native collector package is not a drop-in replacement for every JVM collector scenario.

• Native packages are platform-specific. You must choose the package that matches your OS and CPU architecture.
• The native collector does not support loading external JDBC driver JARs from ext-lib at runtime.
• If your deployment depends on JVM-style runtime classpath extension, keep using the JVM collector package.

When should I stay on the JVM collector?

Use the JVM collector package if your monitoring depends on external JDBC drivers, especially:

• MySQL, which requires mysql-connector-j
• OceanBase, which also depends on the MySQL JDBC driver
• Oracle, which requires ojdbc8 and sometimes orai18n
• DB2, which requires jcc

Package naming

The JVM collector package remains cross-platform:

• apache-hertzbeat-collector-{version}-bin.tar.gz

The native collector package is platform-specific:

• Linux or macOS: apache-hertzbeat-collector-native-{version}-{platform}-bin.tar.gz
• Windows: apache-hertzbeat-collector-native-{version}-windows-amd64-bin.zip

Examples:

• apache-hertzbeat-collector-native-1.8.0-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
• apache-hertzbeat-collector-native-1.8.0-macos-arm64-bin.tar.gz
• apache-hertzbeat-collector-native-1.8.0-windows-amd64-bin.zip

Configuration consistency

The native collector package uses the same config/application.yml layout as the JVM collector package.

That means:

• Collector connection settings are edited in the same place
• Virtual-thread related configuration is edited in the same place
• Native-only boot adjustments are applied by code at runtime instead of maintaining a second application.yml

Recommended decision

• Choose the native collector package when you want lower memory usage and faster startup for non-JDBC monitoring.
• Choose the JVM collector package when you need ext-lib, external JDBC drivers, or JVM-style runtime extensibility.

How are the official multi-platform packages built?

• mvn clean package -pl hertzbeat-collector-collector -am -Pnative builds a native collector package for the current host only.
• The official Linux, macOS, and Windows native release packages are produced by manually running the Collector Native Release GitHub Actions workflow during release preparation, not on every push or pull request.

For package deployment steps, refer to Install HertzBeat via Package.