I was able to create an analysis property for myself that returns true if a computer was added to BigFix in the last 2 days:
now - minimum of subscribe times of sites < 2*day
I thought it would be a good idea to create an automatic computer group that did the same thing - from an IBM License Metric Tool standpoint, it would be useful to see only those computers newly added so the scanners could be installed on them and run for their first time.
However, the “create automatic group” dialog doesn’t allow relevance expressions for group definitions.
Is there an alternate way of creating a group such as this?
The create automatic group dialog does allow for relevance expressions for group definitions. This is the only option I ever use to create automatic groups. It should be the first or second option.
Also, I wouldn’t recommend creating a property with that relevance, as it won’t be accurate. It is fine for testing the relevance, but you can’t really ask a client to evaluate a time from now because it will only be correct the very instant it reported that, then it will be wrong until it reports it again.
That relevance will work just fine for an automatic group.
I’m embarrassed The Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection bar at the top of my screen was blocking the entire pulldown for creating computer groups so I did not see “relevance expression” at the top of the list.
I think this relevance is fine to use for either property or automatic group. You could argue the usefulness/reliability as jgstew pointed out a valid concern, but that’s true regardless of group or property. If used for targeting, the property approach is probably most accurate, as it would force re-evaluation of the relevance (vs membership in the group) at the time of action processing.
For the purpose you described, Mark, I would probably just create a policy action to install the scanner on All Computers. The relevance of the action should ensure that it is only run on endpoints that don’t have it installed yet, so you don’t really need special logic to limit it to newly installed BigFix agents. Once installed, a second policy action that triggers the scans should become relevant causing the scans to kick off.
The Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection bar at the top of my screen was blocking the entire pulldown for creating computer groups so I did not see “relevance expression” at the top of the list.