I’ve been playing with ways to figure out how to automate the grouping of monitored servers. I have a customer who wants to see just their servers. I can create a group and add their servers manually to that group but I think I have a better way of doing it. I can create an attribute.

In Ops Mgr, we can create an attribute that looks at the HKLM registry key and its sub keys. We can then compare its contents to get any key or value we want. So, let’s say you have a group of SQL Servers and they all use your group’s service account for the SQL Server service. I can find that service account in the registry and create that attribute. I can then create a group with dynamic membership so it collects any server where the attribute is true.

A group of servers can be collected and filtered on by determining what attributes of that server are unique and then an attribute can be created to match on that. I can browse the OS directory structure, the system registry or what ever I need to distinguish one server of the same basic type from a group of servers owned by a specific group.

In my example here, I was asked to monitor some depot servers. They all have the same build so the registry keys are all the same. I found HKLM/Software\Boeing Configuration\Filters\Role\BoeingServerRole which contained a value of Depot. Now that I have that attribute, I can create a group with a dynamic discovery rule that looks amazingly like this ( Object is Windows Server 2003 Computer_Extended AND ( BoeingServerRole Equals Depot ) AND True )

This same principle can be used to find a service account assigned to a service, a specific registry key, say, a specific software package or a file or folder in the file system.

Now how sweet is that?