Dynamic host groups by data source
Example: You want to look at metrics on all of your Exchange servers or SQL servers, and you don\'t want to have to keep track of what servers have had SQL or Exchange installed on them. Conceptually the same as LoMo\'s active discover function finding new data sources, the dashboard would \'discover\' any new hosts meeting certain datasource criteria by having an \'Applied to\' filter that was a datasource.
It\'s merely another way at getting to a group of servers. This is very easy to do manually with custom properties, but dashboards by datasource could also assist with the discovery of rogue servers on the network. For example, you could build a dynamic group that said \'\'all servers running HTTP (the datasource), and do NOT have the custom property named \'\'ApprovedHTTPServer\' value set to true. If you ever end up with anything in that group, someone has created an HTTP server without our IT group\'s blessing, and it shows up in this group because the IT group has not manually added the \'ApprovedHTTPServer\'\' property on the host.
Another example: A zero day virus appears (we had one about three months ago), and it spreads through some known mechanism, say SMTP. In situations such as this, there is a critical patch order, and that would obviously first include any servers that were running an available SMTP service. This would also apply to critical patches where best practice is to patch the servers with the specific vulnerabilities first. In these cases, dynamic dashboards by the \'port\' datasource would be indispensible.