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SmartGroup Filter Rules

I am setting up some new Smart Groups which will contain servers for a common system but for different environments. So, for example, SmartGroup 1 will be called "Development" and smart group rules configured to only include those servers with tag matching "BusinessApplication" and "Development".

My problem is that I have 20+ servers used for "BusinessApplication" across 4 different environments and they all appear in the same smart group because they all contain the tag "BusinessApplication".

Does smart group include the facility to use logical operators? So I can create Smartgroup called "Development" and the rules set to only include servers with tags matching "BusinessApplication" AND "Development".

Thank you

  • thwackuseruk​ I have been looking at this a bit today.  I am curious, can you share how you are creating the tags?  Are your creating a single tag with multiple values, or are you creating separate tags completely?  Screenshots and additional details are welcome. 

    In my test, it appears there are areas where we can make some improvements around the tag management.  For starters, it looks like we can improve the manner in which we can bulk assign tags to devices.  I had to manually create a custom tag per device in this case, and assigned two separate values. 

    pastedImage_2.png

    Then I mocked up something similar to your example:

    pastedImage_0.png

    It is adding devices that include both values, but not either or. 

    pastedImage_1.png

  • I think I get it now. I thought I could add a tag name to each device but apparently I need to include a value. So I have created a tag name of "Business Service", then added a value to include (for example) SQL, application name, environment. Then I created a smart group and used the regex wizard to filter on those specific values. To be honest this is a rather laborious and frankly complex way of trying to create smart groups.

    The other problem I now have is adding the tag names and values to all the devices. Using the mass edit tag option it only allows me to add tags to the monitors, not the devices. Which is not how I thought smart groups to work.

    What I am after is a simple method to add a new device, add some tags to correctly describe what the device is for, then create a series of smart groups to show that device.

    So for example:

    New device name = SQLSVR1

    Tags to add = SQL, development, Citrix

    Smart groups to create:

    SG_SQL = filters on tags containing SQL

    SG_CitrixDev= filters on those devices where they contain a tag "Citrix" and "development"

    SG_CitrixLive= filters on those devices where they contain a tag "Citrix" and "production"


    In this example the device SQLSVR1 would appear in SG_SQL and SG_CitrixDev only.

    The advantage with this is that firstly it is easy to identify all the SQL servers and to differentiate whether they are used for dev or live.

    Hope that makes sense!

    At the moment SmartGroups are (in my opinion) not that very smart, overly complicated and laborious to setup. So I think it is just easier to put devices in standard groups and not use tags and smart groups altogether.

    Of course just my opinion :-)

    Thanks for your assistance.

    Regards

  • Absolutely.  And As I stated before, this is perfect feedback and I think we can make some improvements here.  ipMonitor is really focused on Monitors first.  This is really the most important aspect of the tool.  I think we can certainly look at improvements where devices aren't considered secondary citizens in some of the workflows.  It is certainly all about user preference, and I think the best thing to have is options that can satisfy the broadest range of customers, without making things complex.  It seems like a temporary solution could certainly be extending the Mass Edit functionality to devices.  We will see what we can do.  Thanks for sharing! 

  • Hello All,

    We use smart groups - a lot. We start each group with nothing, add monitors/groups based on the property that most closely matches what we want - then we progressively use remove statements to refine it down to what we want.

    We have not used negative regex - but that appears to be an option that would help.

    For the SQL / Dev / Citrix group - start with no devices. Add all devices where property - "display name" starts with SQL. You then remove any devices where tag does not contain citrix. You then remove all devices where tag does not contain Dev.

    A post from long ago explaining IPMONITOR negative regex expressions.

    SmartGroup using negated RegEx

    Just another option that may work.