This is a two part question and should be easy to answer, but I can’t seem to find anything about it yet. When answering the question, please note that I do not have the master operator role.
Custom Filters - If I create a custom filter under “All Content”, is that created only for my profile or is it globally created where other can see it?
Custom Property Analysis - When creating these, how big of an impact do they have on the database and network traffic? Is there a better way for acquiring this data on an ongoing basis? They are very useful, but I want to make sure I’m not bogging down the database. Some of the things I’d like to query for typically on a “once per day” basis would be for example: The file version of a specific software; or whether a specific folder exists; or if a shortcut exists.
You should create analyses with custom properties, but just be sure to set the report period to once every 12 hours or once a day or similar. I would set it up to once an hour in some cases where you might care about the results to be fresh, but that should be fairly rare.
The larger the resulting set of data that is returned by a property * number of computers with results will determine how much that property grows the database.
The frequency of reporting of that property affects the load on the client primarily, but also a bit on the processing of reports by the relays and root server.
I tend to use lots of analysis properties for lots of things. I don’t create properties by themselves often, usually only in an analysis. One advantage of an analysis is you can add relevance to limit the computers that actually report into the analysis so that you only get results for the computers that matter or would have data to report anyway. This extra relevance slightly increases the load on the clients that report in, but significantly decreases the load on all the clients that don’t, but also the rest of the system and the database.
I think having too many Custom Filters is discouraged because it has ongoing server side impact, or something like that. I don’t remember the details.
I used to use Custom Filters, but now that I can write session relevance fairly quickly, I tend to do that instead and then post it to BigFix.Me … so in a sense, you can look up my own custom custom filters. You can do a lot more with session relevance than with Custom Filters in most cases.