Ahh IPM a nice holdover from Ciscoworks Blue.

Its a pretty neat tool and very light weight on your network.

To answer your question I must first clear the air...IPM is to monitor the network performance between nodes, not the actual nodes themselves.

A source is a device from which packets are sent to measure and store information on how they can talk to other elements in your network. It has to have the SAA Agent included in its running software. You can track lots of stuff, more than I can list here easily, but (Echo, paths, UDP, TCP, DNS, UDP, FTP, HTTP, DLSw, DHCP) just scrapes the surface.

A Target can be almost anything, an IP address, another SAA responder or a SNA PU.

A Collector is a process that uses a Source, a Target, and an Operation to create a response report.