A custom object group is a container that includes one or more objects. VMware Aria Operations uses custom groups to collect data from the objects in the group, and report on the data collected.
Why Use Custom Object Groups?
You use groups to categorize your objects and have the system collect data from the groups of objects and display the results in dashboards and views according to the way you define the data to appear.
You can create static groups of objects, or dynamic groups with criteria that determine group membership as VMware Aria Operations discovers and collects data from new objects added to the environment.
VMware Aria Operations provides commonly used object group types, such as World, Environment, and Licensing. The system uses the object group types to categorize groups of objects. You assign a group type to each group so that you can categorize and organize the groups of objects that you create.
Types of Custom Object Groups
When you create custom groups, you can use rules to apply dynamic membership of objects to the group, or you can manually add the objects to the group. When you add an adapter, the groups associated with the adapter become available in VMware Aria Operations.
- Dynamic group membership. To dynamically update the membership of objects in a group, define rules when you create a group. VMware Aria Operations adds objects to the group based on the criteria that you define.
- Mixed membership, which includes dynamic and manual.
- Manual group membership. From the inventory of objects, you select objects to add as members to the group.
- Groups associated with adapters. Each adapter manages the membership of the group. For example, the vCenter Server adapter adds groups such as datastore, host, and network, for the container objects in the vSphere inventory. To modify these groups, you must do so in the adapter.
Administrators of VMware Aria Operations can set advanced permissions on custom groups. Users who have privileges to create groups can create custom groups of objects and have VMware Aria Operations apply a policy to each group to collect data from the objects and report the results in dashboards and views.
When you create a custom group, and assign a policy to the group, the system uses the criteria defined in the applied policy to collect data from and analyze the objects in the group. VMware Aria Operations reports on the status, problems, and recommendations for those objects based on the settings in the policy.
How Policies Help VMware Aria Operations Report On Object Groups
When you apply a policy to an object group, VMware Aria Operations uses threshold settings, metrics, super metrics, attributes, properties, alert definitions, and problem definitions that you activated in the policy to collect data from the objects in the group, and report the results in dashboards and views.
When you create a new object group, you have the option to apply a policy to the group.
- To associate a policy with the custom object group, select the policy in the group creation wizard.
- To not associate a specific policy with the object group, leave the policy selection blank. The custom object group will be associated with the default policy. If the default policy changes, this object group will be associated with the new default policy.
VMware Aria Operations applies policies in priority order, as they appear on the Active Policies tab. When you establish the priority for your policies, VMware Aria Operations applies the configured settings in the policies according to the policy rank order to analyze and report on your objects. To change the priority of a policy, you click and drag a policy row. The default policy is always kept at the bottom of the priority list, and the remaining list of active policies starts at priority 1, which indicates the highest priority policy. When you assign an object to be a member of multiple object groups, and you assign a different policy to each object group, VMware Aria Operations associates the highest ranking policy with that object.
