Best practices for creating groups

Following section guides you through a set of best practices for creating groups that will help you to create useful groups for effective infrastructure monitoring.

• Avoid creating a single group with hundreds or thousands of devices. Not only does this reduce the usefulness of the group, it can also hamper the performance of probable cause analysis if the group is used as a filter. 
• When creating a group that encompasses a large number of devices, it is best to create it from smaller groups that have real meaning in terms of function, dependency, or topological relationships. 
  
  For example, if you are grouping devices according to network topology, BMC recommends a maximum of 254, the number of addresses in a length-24 class-C subnet.

• Avoid creating a large number of monitor groups. Unnecessary monitor groups add overhead to the system and clutter the Groups page on the TrueSight console making the solution unnecessarily difficult to use. You can refer to the results of scalability testing to identify the required number of monitor groups.

• Limit the number of users who can create monitor groups. You can configure the authorization profiles to allow only tenant administrators and a limited number of lead operators to create monitor groups.

• Organize monitor groups in a logical structure:
  • Define and document your strategy to organize monitor groups before you start creating them. Have a logical plan and follow it.
  • Organize by application. Include devices and monitor instances that support a business application in a monitor group or a set of parent-child monitor groups for the specific application.
  • Organize by technology. For example, place devices and monitor instances related to databases into an appropriate monitor group for DBAs.
  • Do not include unrelated and dissimilar devices or monitor instances into the same monitor groups or monitor group hierarchy.
• Do not create monitor groups that might not be used frequently. If you create a monitor group for temporary purposes, delete it as soon as you are finished using it.
• Do not create duplicate monitor groups, that is, monitor groups that contain the same or some of the same objects for the same purposes.
• Provide meaningful names for monitor groups so that they are easily understood.
• Share monitor groups across users to avoid creation of multiple monitor groups that contain the same objects for the same purposes. You can configure sharing of monitor groups from the authorization profiles
• Use server configuration in a monitoring policy to automatically create monitor groups and add devices to them.
• Leverage rule-based monitor groups to automate the assignment of devices and monitor instances to monitor groups.

Where to go from here

Creating, editing, and deleting static groups

Creating, editing, and deleting rule-based groups

Related topics

Groups - Key concepts

Setting up groups to monitor from the TrueSight console