Working with Dynamic Groups or Rule-based Groups

Infrastructure Management enables you to create dynamic groups or rule\-based groups that automatically update their content based on the given rule. A rule is a combination of a pattern match on entity name, entity tag, and monitor\-type filter. These groups contain only monitor instances. 

Assume that an organization has offices in three different locations -- Chicago, Perth, and Copenhagen. Each office has two departments—Planning and Procurement.

Scenario 1

Assume that you have multiple devices that have names based on the location of each office. For example, assume that all devices in Perth have names starting with "PERTH". You can create a group that consists of only those URL monitors that belong to the Perth office. With rule\-based groups, you can create a rule with the name pattern match *PERTH.** on devices and a monitor\-type filter for all URL monitors. Infrastructure Management consolidates all the URL monitor instances that match *PERTH.** in one dynamic group. When new instances are added or existing instances are removed from the device, they are also added or removed from the dynamic group.

Scenario 2

In this scenario, you have some devices that are dedicated to the Planning department in all three locations. The devices are tagged as dept=planning. To create a dynamic group that contains entities that are used by the Planning department, you can attach the tag pattern match dept.*planning to these devices. Infrastructure Management consolidates all the instances associated with the devices with a matching tag into the group.