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Creating and Managing Groups

 

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, System Center 2012 SP1 - Operations Manager

In System Center 2012 – Operations Manager, groups are logical collections of objects, such as Windows-based computers, hard disks, or instances of Microsoft SQL Server. You create a group by using the Create Group Wizard. You can explicitly assign membership to a group or you can create rules that will generate a dynamic group membership.

Some of the purposes for using groups are:

You create and manage groups in the Authoring workspace of the Operations console. A number of groups are created when you install Operations Manager, and other groups may be added when you import management packs. The following image shows the display of groups in the Operations console.

View of groups in Operations console

The icons differentiate between computer groups and instance groups, as shown in the following image.

Icon for computer group and instance group

Computer groups only contain computers. Instance groups can contain all object types, such as an instance of a health service or an instance of a SQL database. Both computer groups and instance groups can contain other computer and instance groups. Another way to view the difference between the group types is:

  • An instance group is populated with objects that match your criteria.

  • A computer group is populated by computers that host objects that match your criteria.

Using the Operations console, you can only create instance groups. To create a computer group, you must use the Authoring console or work directly in the XML of a management pack.