1E 23.11 (SaaS)

The following steps can be used to create a property name:

We use these steps to create Device Tags for Finance, IT Support and Sales departments.

In this brief tutorial, we've shown how to create a Device tag. The next step is to apply a tag to the appropriate devices, as described in Actions to set tags - tutorial.

On the Adding properties - tutorial page we set up a scenario with three departments whose devices we want to manage using 1E. The three departments are Finance, IT Support and Sales. We want to map these departments onto the devices in our example by setting tags. The only thing that links the devices is the departments they belong to, and this is known according to the FQDN of the devices. The best way to handle the setting of the tags is to use a question where the coverage is set to a list of FQDN for a particular department, and follow that with an action that sets the tags for that department.

The following table shows the department mapping we want to model using tags:

Our example environment, as shown in the picture, is obviously very small, but the advantages will be seen for much larger examples, where each department's set of devices may run into the hundreds or even thousands.

Which Instruction should you run? You may already know what devices to target, and so can create a management group, or provide a list of FQDN to run an action against, if now then running a question to obtain the list would be a good way to begin.

Fundamentally, questions return a list of device names, with associated information. This list of device names can then be used to target the devices on which to run actions.

There are many different circumstances, questions and actions that may be used, but generally the question selected should try to meet the following guidelines:

In our example, we will select the question of How many of each operating system version are installed?.

We choose this question because:

For our example, the user Tachyon_Admin1, with the Full Administrator role, is going to set the tags for the finance department. The following steps illustrate how to achieve this:

Having set the tag for the finance device, the exact same approach can be used to set the tags for the other two department's devices. Once all the tags have been set, questions can be asked with scopes that target the tags, as described in Using tags to set the coverage for a question - tutorial.

On the Actions to set tags - tutorial page we set the tags for the devices belonging to a number of departments in our organization. Now we're going to extend the example to deal with a particular scenario and show how the tags can be used when defining the coverage for a question.

In our environment we've just rolled out a software package for a product called Sales Application, this application is used by a number of departments - but we've realized that the Finance department use some extra features of the application that requires a special license. So we urgently want to find if the device in the Finance department has the software installed and apply the special license to only that device.

To find the device we want to treat we will ask the question What versions of <appname> are installed?

For our example the user Tachyon_admin1, with the Full Administrator role, is going to run the question to locate if the Sales Application is on the Finance department device.

We can now target the 1ETRNW73.1etrn.local device outside of 1E with the special license update.

In this tagging example we've seen how Extended Properties administrators define the properties that can be used for tagging, as described in Adding properties - tutorial. We've seen in turn how those tags can be set on 1E client devices by an actioner, as described in Actions to set tags - tutorial. Finally, on this page we've seen how those tags can be used to define the coverage for a question and help to target otherwise unassociated devices simply and effectively.