Contents

Management groups - tutorial

In this tutorial

In this tutorial we add a number of management groups for the ACME organization: one that uses the name of the devices and several that use the Organizational Unit (OU) the devices belong to. The following picture shows what we have in our example Active Directory and how this will appear as management groups in Tachyon. Here you can see there are four servers in the AD Computers group, an additional Domain Controller server and six workstations in the OU.

By the end of this example you will have added six management groups:

  • Devices - this management group will use the names of the devices to bring them all into a single management group.
  • Workstations, Executive, Support, Finance and Sales - these management groups will use an OU rule to separate the devices according to the OU they belong to.

Without management groups

Before describing the process for creating the management groups let's take a look at the Explorer application to see how things look without any management groups defined. The easiest way is to use the devices table in Explorer:

  1. Navigate to the Explorer→Devices→Table page.
  2. On this page you will see all the devices with the Tachyon client installed. In our example there are 12 connected devices.
  3. Clicking on the Management group filter edit field you can see that no management groups are present.
  4. Now switch to the Settings application using the Switch app menu.
  5. Navigate to the Settings→Configuration→Connectors page.
  6. Here you can check that a Tachyon connector has been added and tested.

Now we can start adding the management groups.

Adding the example management groups

To add the management groups:

  1. Navigate to the Settings→Permissions→Management groups page.
  2. To start creating groups click on the Add button to display the Add management group popup.
  3. The Add management group popup lets you set the following parameters for the management group:
    • Name - the name you will identify the group by
    • Description - the description for the group, recommended that you use this to briefly describe the rules that will be used to populate the management group
    • Rules - the rules that define the contents of the management group
    • Evaluate this rule immediately - this checkbox determines whether the rules used to populate the management group are run automatically when the Add button is clicked.
  4. In our first management group, which will contain all the devices in the ACME network, we set the following as shown in the first row of the table opposite :
    1. Name to Devices.
    2. Description to Name ACME (all our devices are named that way).
    3. Rules: we set the first parameter to Device Computer Name, the comparison operator to Contains and then the value to ACME.
    4. The last thing we'll do to our first management group is to ensure that the Evaluate this rule immediately checkbox is unchecked. We do this because we are going to create another 5 management groups and we want to go straight onto doing that without waiting for the reports to run.
    5. Having made all the settings we then click on Add to save the management group.
  5. Our second group will contain all of the devices in the ACME Workstations OU and below. Click on Add to start the process.
  6. Set the following information for the second management group as shown in the second row of the table opposite:
    1. Name to Workstations
    2. Description to OU workstations
    3. Rules: this time we set the first parameter to OU Path, the comparison operator to Contains and the value to Workstations
    4. Ensure that Evaluate this rule immediately is unchecked

    5. Having made all the settings we then click on Add to save the management group

  7. The remaining four management groups are similar to our second management group in that they all use the OU Path property. In the video the process for creating these management groups are shown speeded up.

  8. Repeat the steps outlined in step 6 for the remaining management groups but using the settings in the table opposite:

Having defined all the management groups we now need to evaluate all the rules. 

  1. Click on the Evaluate button.
  2. To check the progress of the Management Group Evaluation action, navigate to the Settings→Monitoring→Process log page (in the video we do this by clicking on the link in the notification banner displayed after clicking Evaluate).
  3. After a few seconds the Status column for the Management Group Evaluation action changes to display a green tick. 

The OU Path rule was introduced in an accumulated hotfix for version 4.1 to replace OU Name which was then deprecated (will be removed sometime in the future).

This tutorial uses OU Path in the same way as OU Name. However, OU Path also allows you to filter on any text in the OU path, using the pipe symbol | as a delimiter of different strings to search for, which must all be true to get a match. For example Workstations|Sales. OU Path allows you to be more explicit if you have OUs with the same name in different parts of your OU structure. 

Management groupParameterValue

Devices

(steps 3 and 4)

NameDevices
DescriptionName ACME
RulesDevice Computer Name contains ACME

Workstations

(steps 5 and 6)

NameWorkstations
DescriptionOU Workstations
RulesOU Path Contains Workstations
ExecutiveNameExecutive Devices
DescriptionOU Executive
RulesOU Path Contains Executive
SupportNameSupport
DescriptionOU Support
RulesOU Path Contains Support
FinanceNameFinance
DescriptionOU Finance
RulesOU Path Contains Finance
SalesNameSales
DescriptionOU Sales
RulesOU Path Contains Sales

Checking the management groups in Explorer

The management group rules have now been evaluated and populated the management groups, it's now time to check how this has effected the Devices page in Explorer.

  1. Navigate to Explorer using the Switch app menu.
  2. Tachyon remembers that we were on the Devices page the last time we were in the Explorer application.
  3. Click on the Management Group filter. A menu pops up displaying all 6 of the new management groups.
  4. Selecting a management group from the menu filters the devices to show just the ones that belong to that management group. 
  5. Clicking on the Sales management group shows that it contains just 1 device.
  6. Clicking on the Workstations management group shows that it contains 6 devices.
  7. Clicking on Executive shows that it contains 2 devices.

The example is now complete. We've created 6 new management groups, one of those with a rule that uses the device name and the other 5 using the OU group the device belongs to. We've then evaluated the rules to populate the management groups with matching devices. At the same time this has synchronized the information with the Explorer application so we can now filter the devices displayed on the Devices table.