Organize your environment using host groups

A host can be assigned to a host group at the following times:

• At the time of OneAgent installation Use the HOST_GROUP or –-set-host-group parameter to assign a host to a group. For example /bin/sh DESK-OneAgent-Linux-1.137.65.sh HOST_GROUP=MyHostGroup or /bin/sh DESK-OneAgent-Linux-1.177.65.sh --set-host-group=MyHostGroup. The –-set-host-group parameter is available since version 1.177.

  On Windows, you can also type the group name in the installer UI.

• After OneAgent installation using the oneagentutil command-line tool.

The host group string may only contain alphanumeric characters, hyphens, underscores, and periods. It must not start with dt. and the maximum length is 100 characters.

The host group is statically assigned to the host. Each host belongs to at most one host group and the host group can only be changed by re-installing OneAgent or by using the 'oneagentctl' command-line interface. Host groups are displayed, for example, on the Monitoring overview page. Click the Host group link to edit the settings for all hosts in a host group.

How host groups affect your monitoring environment

Host groups are sets of hosts. Each group can be configured on the host-group level. This makes it easy to change the settings for a large number of hosts. You can define alerting thresholds and OneAgent update settings on a per-host-group basis. In the example below, the host group accepts the globally-configured anomaly thresholds without overriding them.

You can also define the OneAgent update settings and trigger the update for all the OneAgent installations of a single host group, as shown in the example below. Here the global settings are overridden and all OneAgent installations are automatically updated whenever a new version is released.

Additionally, host groups affect how process groups are detected. When the same process is running in two different host groups, DESK will create one process group for each host group. This means you can also configure process groups differently depending on which host group they run in. Consequently, services are also grouped per host group. So you can configure services differently per host group.

Host groups can also be used in tagging rules and for defining management zones so you can apply additional context information to the different entities in DESK, based on host groups. As shown in the example below, you can tag entities based on the host group they belong to.