Difference between Server Based COmputer Group vs Automatic Group

Hi Team,

Just need to know that what’s the difference between “Server Based Computer Group” vs Automatic Group in BigFix

Thanks & Regards,
Sachin Chhibber

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Automatic group is stored in a site and propagated to all clients that are subscribed to the site, and its their responsibility to evaluate if they are members or not. “Server Based Computer Group” is stored on DB side and it’s strict static evaluation against latest data reported by the clients. Evaluation is on the root server, hence they are a lot faster but you loose quite a bit functionality with them (can’t use relevance/inspectors).

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This is a great topic and appreciate the answers thus far I am interested to get a better understanding…

Since “Server Based” is new, can someone provide examples what would be some good real world use cases to use these groups vs Automatic then?

Probably best use case scenario would be the MultiCloud/Plugin server functionality. You can create a “Server-Based” group for let’s say - All Azure servers in region US-East; or all AWS servers that has Tag1=True; etc. The data from MultiCloud/Plugin server would only be present in the DB, so without this type group it would be nearly impossible to create automatic groups based on that data.

There are of course certain other use cases - for example, in a lot of cases I have agent that are either not reporting or machines offline, so let’s say I want to create an automatic group based on anything and since they are not reporting right now, they will not be in the group; with “server based group”, you create the group and all machines will be in it, irrespective if they are online/reporting or not.

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I haven’t actually tried this yet - can we target an Action to a Server-Based Group to have it executed by the corresponding native client?

I haven’t used the much cause they seem to only work with Global properties and I don’t want to start creating unnecessary global properties, just so I can then create a group but my guess is that they should…

Such a shame its a feature that is restricted to global properties. We also limit our use of global properties, with most being in analysis that are under custom sites

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