Asset Groups and Sensor Groups

This topic introduces Asset Groups and describes the benefits of upgrading from Sensor Groups to Asset Groups.

Note: On 27 November 2023, Asset Groups became available to Carbon Black Cloud customers. Carbon Black recommends that you upgrade from Sensor Groups to Asset Groups as soon as it is operationally feasible for your organization. Sensor Groups will be phased out by 01 December 2024. See Upgrading to Asset Groups from Sensor Groups.

Asset Groups Caveats

Be aware of the following known caveats before deploying Asset Groups:

• Asset Group data is not available in Watchlists or Data Forwarder.
• You can have up to 125 Asset Groups.
• When defining criteria for automatic group membership, you can have up to five criteria sets.
• The maximum number of conditions per criteria set is ten.
• The maximum nesting level is one.

Important: It may take up to 10 minutes for group membership changes to take effect when metadata changes come into the Carbon Black Cloud. This includes actions like new sensor installs, newly create asset groups, and changes to criteria used by asset groups.

Asset Group Benefits

The following features make Asset Groups the preferred method of managing your assets in the Carbon Black Cloud.

• Asset Groups let you add assets to multiple Assets Groups for more flexibility in group creation.
• Policy ranking prioritizes your policies to determine which policy is effective when an asset belongs to multiple groups that have different policies. An asset can have only one effective policy.

  For example, you can create one large Windows Asset Group and add all Windows-based assets to that group. You can then create smaller, more specific Windows Asset Groups, such as a Windows Finance Group. You can add assets to the specialized groups in a segmented manner.

• An expanded set of dynamic criteria gives you more options during group creation. Examples of the enhanced criteria are:
  • Sensor Version
  • Installed By
  • Public Cloud Criteria
  • VM Workloads Criteria
• If you like to build queries, a new Query Builder is available for developing a group's criteria. You can use the Query Builder instead of or in addition to the Criteria Builder.
• You can build more eloquent AND/OR statements for criteria or queries by using Asset Groups. Sensor Groups only offered an OS version AND criteria.
• Statements are case insensitive, whereas Sensor Groups statements are case sensitive.
• The Preview Impact option gives visibility into how actions that impact policy will alter which policies are delivered to which assets.
• You can create and save Asset groups without having a policy attached. This can be helpful in verifying group membership before applying a policy and allows for groups to be created for purposes other than policy delivery.