Planning Your Host Group Hierarchy
The Portal installation sets up a default hierarchy. This default hierarchy includes a group that represents a
physical grouping of clients by backup server. You can create additional host groups to represent
logical groups of hosts. For guidelines, see
Methods of Organizing Hosts.
When you create host groups, consider the following:
Report Scope | Reporting requirements will drive how you organize your host group hierarchy. • Organize host groups so that when you generate reports, you can easily select the servers or a list of hosts that you want included in the report scope. • Create sub-groups of hosts to match your enterprise’s structure—that is, business units, departments, etc. • Account for multiple reporting views. For example, if you need to report on backups by geographical location and you also want to list backup status by operating system type, you will need to have hosts represented in both of these host groups. |
User Access | Host groups provide the framework for limiting a user’s access to data. You will use home groups to limit access. |
Note: If you have a large number of hosts, see
Automated Tool to Create Host Groups.
Using Host Attributes
While host groups provide the main structure for selecting a report’s scope, you also can use another feature—host attributes—to refine report filtering. Attributes give you the ability to further narrow a report’s scope based on a set of second-level characteristics, such as the host’s criticality. Each attribute will have a set of discrete values, so reports can group data by these attributes.
For a list of attributes and guidelines, see
About Attributes.