Solarwinds Application Monitor - Groups

k45bryant

Hello All,

I am new to Solarwinds.  I have managed to figure out through the training videos, quite a few things about this application.  There is one thing I can't wrap my mind around and there are no videos explaining this function.  The topic I am talking about is "Groups".  I understand that groups are a collection of monitored nodes.  What I don't understand is the benefit behind groups.  What are some different scenarios in where someone would use groups.  On my job, I am the Solarwinds admin (scary).  I have a request to create a group consisting of one server.  I was even given the name of the group.  I was able to create the group and add the requested server.  The other part of the request was to add a user to this group.  Is that possible?  I guess if I fully understood the concept of groups, I would be able to fulfill this request.  Can anyone help me?

sirpaw

Hello!

Groups are commonly used in creating dependencies, which is another feature in Orion. Very often you have a group of devices sitting behind one gateway, or the parent, and you'd want to avoid receiving multiple alerts when SolarWinds loses connectivity to all these devices everytime the parent goes down. So a dependency is created, where alerts for the child group behind the parent are suppressed, because it is understood that they are only down, or "unreachable" as SolarWinds provides as a status, because the parent is down. (Create a dependency between network objects - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support )

Groups can also be used to provide a summary status of a particular group of devices in your network, and in return can be used for alerting and maps in your dashboard. There was a recent improvement in the latest version which you can find here: https://thwack.solarwinds.com/docs/DOC-201965#jive_content_id_Group_Availability

Regarding the user, I presume that the request was for a particular user to have visibility in SolarWinds to a particular group of devices only? If this is the case, then you might want to create a user in Manage Accounts, then add a limitation where the user can only view specific devices or those that satisfy a particular vendor, device type or custom property. You can also create a view in Manage Views, and add a limitation there for the devices covered, and assign this view as a home/summary page for the user's account. For more on this, please see links below:

Set account limitations - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Limit an Orion Web Console user account to a custom view - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Hope this helps!