Screencast: SF Manager - Managing Using Application Groups

Hi Satish,

Thanks for the screencast. I found Application Groups to be a bit hard to understand re things like the base object vs. dependencies, but after watching the screencast that all makes (pretty obvious) sense.

Quick question: is it possible (or *will* it be possible) to create groups that are a bit more dynamic in nature. For example: you Solaris Group was a selection of all CURRENT Solaris machines... it would be nice to have a group set up which is all machines where O/S=Solaris, so that as time goes on and more Solaris hosts are managed by this CMS, the group will dynamically change and apply to all the *current* Solaris hosts.

Cheers,
Tomer 

Hi Tomer,

Unfortunately it is not there in SFM 2.1 and we were not planning on adding it too. We actually had a long and hard look before making this decision.

Here is the reason why...

Groups are not only collection of things for reporting/grouping/emulating business service etc. they are also tied intricately to security.

When there is any relation to security, we want the users to be quite explicit about adding something to a group and not automatic. The last thing you want is some person getting admin access to a host just because it happen to have something in common based on the criteria that was used for group creation.

Hope this answers your question.

Satish

Hi Satish,

That makes perfect sense... it's that trade-off between convenience and security that is always causing problems on one side or the other.
:-)

Cheers,
Toimer