Best Practice - Hosts in different physical location in one site

Hello everyone! I am back with another Best Practice topic. And I know there is no right answer here, but I would love to collect some input and maybe compile an overview for anyone having the same question.

Consider the following environment:

  • Distributed monitoring, one satellite/site per customer, central master
  • Within each customer’s site folder there are folders for technical separation
    • e.g. Windows, Linux, Network (Network has sub folders like Firewall, Switches, etc.)
  • Customers may have different geological locations

We recently got the request to group the customer’s hosts by location. A colleague of mine went ahead and created the following configuration:

  • Within the bottom level folders (e.g. Switch) there now are folders named by location
  • Based on the folders host labels are assigned to the hosts within
  • Based on the labels the hosts are put into host groups

Now my feeling is, that this cannot be the optimal solution and it might over complicate configuration.
Maybe someone has already input on this, otherwise I will update this topic while feedback arrives.

Thanks in advance for all input, I appreciate it!

Update: As the question arose: The use case for this is primarily to be able to but hosts in downtime based on their location.

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Hi Thorian,

just out of curiosity:
in the end, what are you using the assigned hostgroups for?
(and there are no hosttags involved?)

Cheers,
Kai

This is practical three times the same doing. I would only use one of the three.

  • folders for locations → if i have enough hosts on every location and i want to build a structure beneath this folder to make some logical separation - server / switch and so on - drawback - this must be done for every location
  • labels for hosts → unique label per location - only one folder tree with all the logical separtion - drawback - at the moment no dropdown menu with all the labels of one typ, selection problem inside the GUI - good for automations and reports
  • hostgroups → one group per location - every user can select with dropdown menu the right filter - drawback - you need a second mechanic to assign the hosts to this groups - if this is used i would combine the classic hostgroups with labels or host tags, manual assignment is normally no option

Hi, quick answer: Currently those groups are primarily used to easily schedule downtimes.

Hosttags are no options as there are several customers and host tags are global. So all customers could see all locations, which some customers probably wouldn’t appreciate. :slight_smile:

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I get your point Andreas and I think that thought crossed my mind already.

Just to make sure I got you correctly:

  • You suggest the following structure: Customer → Location → Technical (Windows, Linux, Switches etc.), right?
  • You basically say, that lables are not ideal but apart from distinct folders the only real option to group the hosts without having globally visible host tags, right?

Only if there are enough hosts to justify the more on configuration work.
Smaller installations would look like
Customer → Technical

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