A data Collector is a windows server machines that we deployed a CU agent on and defined in any extension connection settings page as a data collector.

The data collectors role is to be the single point of the ControlUp platform that connects to your Hypervisors, EUC, NetScaller, Linux machine, AWS, etc. collects the API data and then all other CU Consoles and Monitors get the data from the data collector. This increases the performance of ControlUp on one hand and on the other hand reduce the ControlUp footprint on the extensions.

You can read more about data collectors here