Understanding Site Groups and Service Groups

Last updated on 2020-06-12 15:36:09

Service Groups

A service group is an organizational container for devices, which may contain devices from multiple sites. The advantage of service groups is the ease of administration when managing like devices or applications. As well, it provides views at the group level and reports at the group level.

You can create as many service groups as you want.

Site Groups

A site group is an organizational container for devices related to a single site. The advantage of site groups is the ease of identifying alerts occurring on a per-site basis.

Any customer may be monitored by multiple Onsite Managers and Device Managers organized into one or more sites in Service Center. When this is the case, you can organize the sites by physical location, and the site groups by function, such as Netstone-Finance, Netstone-Marketing, and so on.

Site group creation is extremely important since it provides you the filters required for enhanced reporting as well as staff organization and a more effective and friendly user interface. Site grouping is also very effective for asset management and scripting.

You can create as many site groups as you want. You can also create shared site groups, which are centrally managed with one site group definition that automatically creates site groups at new sites. For more information, see Creating Shared Site Groups.

Automatically Adding Devices to Groups

You can create automatic inclusion rules that determine the criteria a device must match to be included in the site or service group. As new devices are discovered, they are automatically added to the site and service groups to which they meet the defined inclusion rules. Conversely, if a change is made to a device and it no longer meets the inclusion rules, it is automatically removed from the group.

You can also manually add devices to a group. Devices that were added manually are included in the group regardless of whether they match automatic inclusion rules or not. See Manually Adding Devices to Groups.

You can create automatic inclusion rules by defining logical AND or OR statements, and then adding the rule criteria.

See Creating Rules to Add Devices to a Group Automatically.

Defining the scope

When creating automatic inclusion rules, you can optionally limit the scope of devices that are monitored. The scope of a group's automatic inclusion rules defines against which sites and groups any rules run, looking for devices with matching criteria.

You can choose to use a system-wide scope, which means all devices that appear in Service Center have the rules check for inclusion, or a custom scope, where you limit the rules execution to sites and groups you specify.

You can further refine the scope by adding exclusions to prevent sites, groups or devices you specify from being included, even if they are within the defined scope. For site groups, you can exclude specific devices. For service groups, you can exclude sites, groups, and devices.

See Defining Scope for a Service Group.

Folders

A folder is a top-level organizational unit for service groups. For example, a folder called Workstations could contain a service group for Windows XP Workstations and Windows 7 Workstations.