A. The MAP toolkit can gather information and performance metrics from computers in your environment based on IP address or domain membership. The performance metrics gathering collects information every five minutes from selected machines. The MAP tool has to be running to collect the information—if you close the tool, collection stops. You can't run the MAP as a service and a user has to be logged on for the application to run.
The good news is that if you close the tool to reboot or log off, you don't have to lose all collected data. When you relaunch MAP, select the option to use an existing database. When the Performance Metrics wizard is launched, it will say old data is found and to click Yes to erase it or No to keep it and merge new data with the old. You should select No.
If you need protection from having to reboot a PC, you can always run MAP in a virtual machine that's part of a Hyper-V cluster, allowing physical boxes to be rebooted without rebooting the MAP VM. Make sure you keep the VM in locked status.