Index
Overview
Grouping is a fundamental feature in the Statseeker product, it is a core mechanic utilized by:
- Reporting
- Thresholds
- Alerting
- Visibility and access control
- Filtering response data when utilizing the API
Grouping can also be used to assist with infrastructure maintenance, as well as highlighting poorly configured hardware or hardware that is mis-representing it's actual configuration - in many instances, a sign of a failing device.
Statseeker offers the ability to automatically group devices/interfaces, as they are discovered, based on rules that you define. You are able to edit those rules at any time, and have those changes reflected immediately. You can also manually create and edit groups to best suit your requirements, manage visibility of those groups and create new logical associations as the need arises.
What can you group?
Statseeker groups are arbitrary buckets that can hold any type of object that Statseeker is aware of:
- Network devices (of any type) discovered by Statseeker
- Interfaces on those devices
- Users
- Reports - both default and custom
- SLA configurations
A group can contain any number of objects, and any number of object types can be contained within a single group.
How is Grouping Useful?
Grouping is a primary method for filtering data that Statseeker collects, and as such, grouping simplifies almost everything you want to do in Statseeker.
Statseeker's default reports either require a target of a single device, or, are network-wide. With groups, all network-wide reports can also be targeted to a physical location, a subnet, a type of device, devices running a specific firmware version, etc. Custom reports can be configured during creation to target a group of devices/interfaces, or left network-wide, and then passed a group (or selection of groups) at run-time.
Likewise, thresholds can be configured to target a single interface, a single device, or any Statseeker group(s). Thresholds can also be configured to run network-wide, and any number of group specific alerts can be configured to trigger off of that single threshold.
Managing the ability of Statseeker user accounts to view and interact with different elements of your network via Statseeker is entirely driven by grouping, and the relationship between individual users (or groups of users) and groups of devices and reports.
Grouping underpins the efficient use of a large amount of Statseeker's core functionality.
How do you group objects?
Manual Grouping
Grouping can be achieved by creating a group, and then manually adding objects to the group. This is a quick and simple method to create arbitrarily populated groups for ad-hoc uses, but not an efficient method to manage grouping on the whole.
Manual grouping is also the only method available when populating a group with non-infrastructure objects, such as:
- Statseeker users
- Reports
- SLA Configurations
For more information regarding manual group creation and population see Manual Grouping.
Automated Grouping
In most instances users will want to forgo manual grouping for automated grouping. Automated grouping allows users to define rules which, when applied to the network, automatically create groups and populate them. These auto-grouping rules are run during the discovery process, and during Statseeker's daily rewalk of the network. Auto-grouping rules can be configured to create self-pruning groups ensuring that Statseeker group contents are always representative of your network.
Users are also able to configure an auto-grouping rule to collect all devices not current managed to by grouping, highlighting instances where current rules may need to be modified to cater to the scope of the network. For more information see Automated Grouping.