Managing Attributes Version 10.2.01P10

Attributes provide a way of defining a set of objects that share a certain characteristic. Attributes represent logical relationships between objects and their relevant characteristics. Typically, you’ll set up attributes to aid in defining the scope of a report. For example, you might set up a “maintenance contract” attribute that you can associate with the hosts for which you have service coverage. Or, you might create an attribute to organize hosts by geographical location so that the administrators responsible for the hosts at each corporate location can generate reports for their specific sites.

You can select hosts in bulk and assign or modify attributes associated with them. Use Search and Advanced Filters to create a results set with the hosts you’d like to modify. For example, you can create a search query to find all Windows 2008 R2 systems as reported by NetBackup. When the search results are displayed, you can quickly apply a custom attribute such as patch applied.

1. Select Admin > Advanced > Attributes.

2. From the drop‑down list, select the domain to which you want to add the attribute. Your domain is displayed by default. Typically, only one domain is available and this domain selection is required only for multi-tenancy environments, such as Managed Services Partners (MSPs). When you add or delete attributes, you do so globally for your domain and all child domains. See also Attribute Inheritance Overrides.

3. Click Add. The Add Attribute dialog is displayed.

You can choose to have the values sorted. By sorting, the values will be displayed alphabetically in the Portal.

When inheritance is disabled, users in sub-domains will be able to see the attribute, but they will not be able to see values in the Inventory or in a report scope. However, an administrator at the sub-domain or parent level can override the values of the attribute, making the attribute’s values available to the sub-domain. See Override Inherited Attribute Values.

If the user-defined attribute was created within your IT Analytics Domain, the attribute name, values, and description can all be modified. Most environments have only a single Domain. However, for multi-tenancy environments, where a hierarchy of Domains is used to partition data, you are not permitted to modify attribute names in child Domains. You can modify the inheritance flag and the list of values of an attribute that was inherited from a parent. See also, Attribute-Naming Rules and Attribute Inheritance.

Table 1 Example Attributes and Attribute Values
Attribute Name	Possible Values	Purpose
Application	SAP Exchange	Data based on the software application running on the host.
Asset_Tag	0001234 0001235	For asset management purposes, perhaps you want to report on backup servers by asset tag.
Backup_Server	BackupServer1 BackupServer2	You will certainly want to report on backup servers/clients based on the backup server that backs up the backup server/clients’ user data. Backup Server is the most common attribute, which is why the Portal creates a default group to represent this characteristic.
Business_Unit	Marketing Accounting	Backup servers/hosts often contain backups of data owned by users from specific business groups (for example, Marketing).
CPU	Opteron UltraSPARC	If you need to know how your backups are performing on your backup servers with specific CPUs, simply run reports based on this attribute.
Location	Americas Asia	If you are responsible for hosts in a region, you can select a scope for your region. It may make sense to set up host groups by geographical location or, as an alternative, create an attribute to group hosts by location.
Country_Code	004 248	You can be very specific about the location of hosts that you have spread throughout the world.
Host_Type	Production Test Server	This attribute can represent production vs. test machines. Data on production systems is critical to your business. Test data is important, too, but you might want to know how data is being produced on your production systems particularly.
SysAdmin	Alix Emily	Hosts are managed by this person.
OS	Linux Windows Mac	If you need to roll out patches for a particular operating system, you can quickly determine when the user data on those hosts will be backed up. Your values can be general or specific (for example, Solaris 10).