Most people have a love hate relationship with Groups in in Operations Manager, you cannot really avoid them but there are some catches when you begin to work with them but let me explain in short. A group is a collection of objects. They can be instances of the same class or of different classes. Groups have population criteria that define what objects are added to them. This can be a dynamic criteria that adds objects as they are discovered or explicit criteria where you manually add specific objects to the group.

Groups are used to scope overrides, views, and user roles and to set the scope of monitoring for certain templates. They are not used to target monitors and rules.

When you are working in a multi tenant environment you would like to have you groups created automatically, but this is pretty differcult with powershell since we dont really have any command which take care of group management.

We in Coretech have done an Group Robot which could create your groups automatically from a text file. So if you are in need of a tool like this please download it here:

The way to do it:

  1. Download our GroupCreatorTool and expand it into a Folder
  2. Create a new Management Pack,  e.g. called: IBM Servers Group
  3. In the file Computers.txt add the computers you want included in the group
  4. In the GroupCreatorProperties.xml file change the contents accordingly

Sample:

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Save and close all files and run the GroupCreatorProduction.bat and now you are able to create Groups with a command.

We Hope you like the tool

Kåre

Click to Download GroupCreatorTool