Identifying servers by their role

Customizations
1

(imported topic written by MountainMan91)

I would like to identify servers by their main role (database, application, domain ‎‎controller etc.) in the BES console. Could I add the role into comments within the ‎‎computer properties and populate that information into a custom property (to display an ‎‎additional column in the BES console)? I am limited in writing/collecting information as ‎I am dealing with a mixed environment (Unix and Windows).‎

2

(imported comment written by jessewk)

The “usual” way to do this would be to tag the role on the actual endpoint and then have it report that back as a retrieved property result. One simple cross platform way is to create a custom client setting to hold your tag.

Say you have 3 machines you want to tag ‘Database’.

  1. Multi-Select them, then right-click and choose 'edit computer settings…

  2. Check ‘Custom Setting’, name the setting ‘ServerRole’ and give it a value ‘Database’

  3. Send out the action.

Then create a retrieved property called ‘Server Role’ with this definition: values of settings “ServerRole” of client

Now you’ll be able to target actions, sort, filter, etc by the Retrieved Property ‘Server Role’.

You can get a lot fancier by putting a relevance expression in the value field instead of hard coding ‘Database’. For example, you could look for the presence of SQL and automatically tag any machine with SQL as ‘Database’ , any machine that is a DC could report DC, etc. Depending how you set up the relevance expression, you can also get machines with more than one role to report all those roles automatically and also have a fall through group for servers that don’t meet any of the criteria.

It’s all about how you set up your relevance expression. We call client settings that evaluate based on a relevance expression ‘Dynamic Settings’. You can see a good detailed example in comment #4 I made to this thread: http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=100

Jesse