Node Category - How to configure?

As far as I can tell, this is just an automated way to detect a device type, or manually change if you want or need to.  It looks like the only choices are Server, Network and Other.  There isn't anything about that field on the Admin Manual I have been reading.  I am sure there is a way to use this to our advantage though.

Many devices will auto-detect the category if you leave it in auto-detect.  Most of my network devices are categorized as Network, Windows servers as Servers, etc.  The left over devices like my UPS nodes seem to go to Other.

Its a new "system custom property" that solarwinds can automatically determine.  I suppose they realized or got feature requests that separating nodes by network and server is common practice.  I know that it was for me, because I would often create a custom property to separate network devices and servers.  It does do a good job of auto determining, and if you use this cp throughout Orion in alerting, reporting, grouping, dashboarding, etc., you can rest assured that new nodes will get tagged with the appropriate value without having to worry about your sw admins or users remembering to tag new nodes with important custom properties being used throughout Orion.

I don't doubt the intended usefulness - I had thought that this was a way to 'template' different types of devices. For example, if all your servers should have a specific custom property set, then a device that gets recognized as a 'Server' would have that property set automatically. There was talk of this feature some years ago, so I assumed that this was the realization of that discussion.

As it is, I find no benefit to the Node Category, as I already have a CP set up to designate different types of devices, plus there are only three types (Other, Network, Server - yay), which is why I wanted to configure it further. Is this a not-yet-fully-implemented feature?

I agree - little to little, little to late. Those of us that have had an install for a while have already created this - its a useless field. AND since we can modify it - its wasted.

Internally they use it to make minor tweaks to the resources that show up on the node details page.  For example, you might notice the network devices don't load an appstack resource.  For the most part it doesn't seem to be intended for end users to mess with.  There may be some other back end things it ties in to as well but so far that's the most obvious impact I see from manipulating it.