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JosiahBenoit's avatar
JosiahBenoit
Icon for Neophyte rankNeophyte
5 months ago

Resource Explorer

Hi,

When utilizing the newly released "Resource Explorer" I am attempting to Group by: "Resource Type" these grouping has a lot of "No Resource Type" and "Unknown" resources being grouped together, when I drill into them I clearly know what type of resources what they are, some switches, routers, net storage and other such things.  Does anyone know a way to "Tag" the resources in the "Resource Explorer" to clean this up? If, you have a better training then something provided on LM Academy or you can find via of a Google search that would be much appreciated.    

 

 

  • Alright, I think I have this figured out to make the Resource Explorer mostly usable.  My org did not really apply property sources or the ones they did apply were not updated. From what I can tell in my sandbox once the property sources are updated and applied to the resources, that seems to allow for logical groups inside of resource explorer.  

  • Resource Explorer works based on properties on devices, so changes would need to be done there rather than in the explorer itself (afaik). Hovering over Resource Type shows that it's using the "predef.externalResourceType" property. I believe this is coming from the Topology/ERI system that finds relationships/connections between devices but I'm not sure. I don't know too much about this system or exactly how this property is set. I would suggest checking that you have added/updated all the addERI_* PropertySources as I believe these are what sets them (but I might be wrong).

     

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous

      That's right Mike_Moniz . For us, it makes all the default grouping unusable since the coverage is so poor. It would be nice if we could specify which property to use for the "device type" built in grouping field.

      We've been struggling to find a use case for this besides, "oh look, this is a colorful view". However, if you ever find yourself looking for a reason to use a feature in a product, that's a clear indicator that they built the feature without actual users in mind.

  • We use a property source to tag device types based on its static group.  ERI's were not consistent or would misclassify device types so now we just rely on the static group and tag them that way.  All of our customers have the same nested folder architecture so this is what works for us.  

    Example below showing just the beginning of the if statement

    import com.santaba.agent.groovyapi.expect.Expect;
    import com.santaba.agent.groovyapi.snmp.Snmp;
    import com.santaba.agent.groovyapi.http.*;
    import com.santaba.agent.groovyapi.jmx.*;
    import org.xbill.DNS.*;
     
    def staticgroup = hostProps.get("system.staticgroups")
     
    if(staticgroup =~ "Switch"){
    println "auto.cmdb.devicetype=Switch"
    }else if(staticgroup =~ "Firewall"){
    println "auto.cmdb.devicetype=Firewall"
    }else if(staticgroup =~ "Router"){
        println "auto.cmdb.devicetype=Router"
     
    I just checked in resource explorer and was able to group devices by the println name. 
    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous

      That's exactly what we do. But we're still trying to find a use case that lasts more than 3 minutes of ooohs and aaahs.

  • Alright, I think I have this figured out to make the Resource Explorer mostly usable.  My org did not really apply property sources or the ones they did apply were not updated. From what I can tell in my sandbox once the property sources are updated and applied to the resources, that seems to allow for logical groups inside of resource explorer.  

  • Just to put a little clarity on this topic, in the example I am going use two of my domain controllers.  One is listed as a PhysicalServer with the categories of dfs,snmp the other one is in No Resource Type with the categories of dfs,MicrosoftDomainController,TopoSwitch,WinDHCP,Windows_DNS,Windows,snmp,Windows_DHCP

    is this really that messed up? 

    • Mike_Moniz's avatar
      Mike_Moniz
      Icon for Professor rankProfessor

      If you find that you are missing categories, that is usually (but not always) a case where detection is not working correctly. Usually it's an access or configuration issue. In this case, I suspect that WMI to that first DC is not working. For a Windows server, almost all the detection and checks require WMI.