When deploying SmartSense in an enterprise environment, you must carefully plan your network architecture. SmartSense functionality relies on how multiple internal clusters create bundles and then send them through a central SmartSense Gateway to the hosted Hortonworks environment for analysis or to Hortonworks Support to troubleshoot support cases.

The following graphic illustrates how data traffic flows along various communication channels between cluster nodes and SmartSense ports:

The communication channels illustrated here are described in the following sections: