Making Resources Easier to Locate

Organizing Resources into Groups

In SAS Environment Manager, resources are organized into groups to make them easier to locate and manage. There are six different types of groups:

platform resource groups
server resource groups
service resource groups
compatible groups
mixed groups
applications

resource groups

These groups are automatically created. When resources are discovered and then added to the inventory of monitored resources, they are added to the appropriate resource group. The three resource groups that are automatically created in SAS Environment Manager are platforms, servers, and services. It is important to note how SAS resources map to the resource hierarchy. For example, logical SAS servers are added to the services group.

compatible groups

These groups contain selected instances of a single type of resource (for example, SAS Object Spawners). Creating a compatible group enables you to view aggregate metrics for a resource type. Compatible groups also make it easier for you to locate resources that you need to monitor. For example, you can create a group containing several servers of critical importance, which prevents you from having to search for those servers among the large numbers that might be on your site. After you create a compatible group, you can add resources to the group if they match the selected group type.

mixed groups

These groups are user-created groups that can contain multiple types of resources. Mixed groups can contain other groups, platforms, servers, and services, or applications. Availability is the only metric that is available for a mixed group. This type of group is useful for functions such as checking the availability of a SAS Object Spawner and all of the spawned services or for viewing the collective availability of a group of resources.

application

These groups are a set of selected services, usually running in different servers on multiple platforms, that together fulfill a single business purpose. Creating application groups enables you to manage your infrastructure from an application perspective, as opposed to a hardware perspective.

If you initialize SAS Environment Manager Extended Monitoring, a set of default compatible and mixed groups is created. These groups provide commonly used collections of resources in a SAS environment. They are automatically updated as you add and remove resources. See Initializing SAS Environment Manager Extended Monitoring for initialization instructions.

Create a Group

To create and populate a group:

On the Resources page, select Tools MenuNew Group.
On the New Group page, specify a name for the group.
Use the Contains Resources menu to select the type of group that you want to create.
Use the Select Resource Type menu to select the type of resource that the group will contain.
Click OK to create the group.
On the Resources page, click on a resource that you want to add to the group.
On the Details page for the selected resource, select Tools MenuAdd To Group.
On the Group Manager page, select the group to which you want to add the resource. If the group that you want to add the resource to is not listed, then the selected resource type is not the same as the resource types that are specified for the group.

Create an Application

To create and populate an application:

On the Resources page, select Tools MenuNew Application.
On the New Application page, specify a name for the application. Click OK to create the application. The Configuration page for the application appears.
In the Services area, click Add to List to select resources for the application.
In the Services List, select the services in the Services list that you want to add to the application and use the arrow button to move them to the Add Services list. Click OK when you finish selecting services, and then click OK again to create the application.