Management Groups tutorial

In this tutorial, we add a number of Management Groups for the ACME organization: one that uses the name of the devices and several that use the Organizational Unit (OU) the devices belong to. The following picture shows what we have in our example Active Directory and how this will appear as Management Groups in 1E. Here you can see there are two servers in the AD Computers group, an additional Domain Controller server and five workstations in the OU.

By the end of this example, you will have added six Management Groups in addition to the default All Devices Management Group:

• All Devices - this Management Group brings all devices into a single Management Group.

• Servers, Workstations, Executive, Support, Sales and Finance - these Management Groups will use an OU rule to separate the devices according to the OU they belong to.

Without Management Groups

Before describing the process for creating the Management Groups, let's take a look at the Explorer application to see how things look without any Management Groups defined. The easiest way is to use the Devices table in Endpoint Troubleshooting:

1. Navigate to the Endpoint Troubleshooting→Devices→Table page.

2. On this page you will see all the devices with the 1E client installed. In our example, there are 7 connected devices.

3. Clicking on the Management Group filter edit field, you can see that no Management Groups are present.

4. Now switch to the Settings application using the Switch app menu.

5. Navigate to the Settings→Configuration→Connectors page.

6. Here you can check that a 1E connector has been added and tested.

If you have configured a connector, you can start adding Management Groups.

Adding example Management Groups

By default, in a new installation of 1E, all devices are members of the All Devices group. If you have upgraded from a previous version of 1E, your previously created Management Group will be preserved and will become a child Management Group of All Devices Management Group. You can create Child Management Groups and nest them into a Hierarchy Structure where child Management Groups inherit rules from their parent groups.

Using child Management Groups you could create by hand a Management Group structure which mirrors your Configuration Manager collections, or divide your Management Groups by device type, for example into servers and workstations. You can use the delegation feature to create Management Groups that mirror your organizational structure with associated delegated roles.

• To find out how to use scripts to import a Management Group structure from a file or from Configuration Manager collection, refer to Creating direct-based Management Groups.

• Refer to the Roles for details about how you can use the delegation feature.

To add our Management Groups:

1. Navigate to the Settings→Permissions→Management Groups page.

2. To start creating groups click on the Add Child button to display the Details screen.

3. Add Child lets you set the following parameters for the Management Group:

   • Name - the name you will identify the group by

   • Description - the description for the group, use this to briefly describe the rules used to populate the Management Group

   • Rules - the rules that define the contents of the Management Group.

4. In our first Management Group, which will contain all the servers in the network, we set the following as shown in the first row of the table opposite :

   1. Name to Servers.

   2. Description to All servers.

   3. Rules: we set the first parameter to Device OS, the comparison operator to Contains and then the value to Server.

   4. Having made all the settings we then click on Save to save the Management Group.

   5. The last thing we could do is click Evalute. We don't do this immediately because we are going to create another 5 Management Groups, and we want to go straight onto doing that without waiting for the reports to run.

5. Our second group will contain all the devices in the Workstations OU and below. We make sure we select the All Devices level in our Hierarchy Structure as we want this OU to be a child of All Devices. We click on Add to start the process.

6. Set the following information for the second Management Group, as shown in the second row of the table opposite:

   1. Name to Workstations

   2. Description to All workstations

   3. Rules: this time we set the first parameter to OU Path, the comparison operator to Contains and the value to Workstations

   4. Having made all the settings we then click on Add to save the Management Group.

7. Repeat the steps outlined in step 6 for the remaining Management Groups but using the settings in the following table.

The remaining four Management Groups are similar to our second Management Group in that they all use the OU Path property. The remaining Management Groups represent different departments in the organization and contain end user devices. These groups will be child Management Groups to the parent workstations Management Group, by creating a hierarchy in this way we can later delegate management responsibilities by assigning 1E users, groups and roles to them.

When creating Child Management Groups, check that you are creating that group in the correct part of your hierarchy. When you create a new group, it's place in the hierarchy is shown above the Name field.

Child Management Group	Parameter	Value
Servers (steps 3 and 4)	Name	Devices
Description	All servers
Rules	Device OS contains server
Workstations (steps 5 and 6)	Name	Workstations
Description	OU Workstations
Rules	OU Path Contains Workstations
Executive	Name	Executive Devices
Description	OU Executive
Rules	OU Path Contains Executive
Support	Name	Support
Description	OU Support
Rules	OU Path Contains Support
Finance	Name	Finance
Description	OU Finance
Rules	OU Path Contains Finance
Sales	Name	Sales
Description	OU Sales
Rules	OU Path Contains Sales

Having defined all the Management Groups we now need to evaluate all the rules.

1. Click on the Evaluate All button in the top right corner of the page, if you have more than one inventory in your 1E configuration you will be prompted to choose which repository you wish run evaluate your Management Groups against. Then click Yes, proceed to Evaluate.

2. To check the progress of the Management Group Evaluation action, navigate to the Settings→Monitoring→Process log page.

3. After a few seconds the Status column for the Management Group Evaluation action changes to display a green tick.

Checking the Management Groups in Endpoint Troubleshooting

The Management Group rules have now been evaluated and populated the Management Groups, it's now time to check how this has affected the Devices page in Endpoint Troubleshooting.

1. Navigate to Endpoint Troubleshooting using the Switch app menu.

2. 1Eremembers that we were on the Devices page the last time we were in the Endpoint Troubleshootingapplication.

3. Click on the Management Group filter. A menu pops up displaying all 6 of the new Management Groups.

4. Selecting a Management Group from the menu filters the devices to show just the ones that belong to that Management Group.

5. Clicking on the Sales Management Group shows that it contains just 1 device.

6. Clicking on the Workstations Management Group shows that it contains 5 devices.

7. Clicking on Executive shows that it contains 2 devices.

The example is now complete. We've created 6 new Management Groups, one of those with a rule that uses the OS type name and the other 5 using the OU the device belongs to. We've then evaluated the rules to populate the Management Groups with matching devices. At the same time, this has synchronized the information with the Endpoint Troubleshooting application, so we can now filter the devices displayed on the Devices table.