topic Re: Hierarchical Grouping in Active IQ Unified Manager Discussions

Hierarchical Grouping

jhanna — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:34:46 GMT

Operations Manager allows for hierarchical grouping. Aside from configuration groups, Operations Manager allows storage assets (appliances, volumes, LUNs, etc…) to be organized into groups that match how the organization uses the assets, e.g. by location, by project/application, by department, or some combination of the above. Grouping provides filtered reporting, better control of resources, and the ability to target alerts to resource owners. Groups can be a mixture of appliances, volumes, qtrees, aggregates, datasets, FSRM paths, resource pools, MultiStore virtual filers and LUNs or can be composed of the same type of objects. The question is how do you use these groups? Do you break-down your assets by datacenter, region, office, application, or what? What hierarchy do you use and why?

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

reinoud7 — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:31:20 GMT

In the past, we had a lot of groups in OM. They were organized by (large) application. The raison for this is that you want to report/manage/follow-up by application. So that you can see what the growth of data is for a specific area. For some applications, this was also a perfect way to handle alerts.

Today, we have just a few groups. All the reporting we do now in SQL report server (we copy every day all the data from OM to a SQL-server). All the trends, history and data use can we find there. We tag all the resources in OM so that we can create very easy a lot of reports.

The groups in OM we use only for alerting (to send the correct alert to the right person).

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

friea — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:57:52 GMT

Is there a benefit to having fewer groups? did you intentionally change your reporting structure to have fewer OM groups, or did it just end up that way because other things in your organization changed?

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

reinoud7 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:03:29 GMT

We have fewer, because we do the reporting part in a other system (but based on the data of OM). Reporting is always very difficult (in every product). So we use our own report environment to make our reports. That's more flexible than in most of the products. But I must be honest, we haven't test the latest improvements of OM in that area. Maybe it's now very easy to generate the reports that we want.

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

fenton — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:52:00 GMT

Remember the groups are multi-faceted in Operations Manager, for sure you cna use them for segrgating reporting into more granular chunks (this is great for chargeback and reporting utilsaition/trends in different areas) but there are many other uses for groups; here are a few for example:

Delegation of authority: the capability can be defined but ultimately the capability is applied to a group object this allows you to do many thing including delegation of authority, allow users to run their own storage reports etc etc

Configuration Management - you can apply a configuration (standard template of ONTAP options and standardised /etc files) to a group of controllers rather than individual ones; In my environment I keep seperate groups for each of the platforms so I can apply configurations to the platforms of choice;

Performance Advisor Thresholds - thresholds can be applied to groups of objects so again I can decide to create groups based on hwo I want to deploy Performance thresholds (eg, group all my Exhc App volumes into a groups and then create a threshold to alert should a the volume latency > 20ms for a sustained period of time

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

reinoud7 — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:24:08 GMT

Can a resource be a member of two different groups? In the past, this was not possible and this was also a raison that we choose only one dimension: the alert dimension.

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

fenton — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:04:34 GMT

Yes - it can reside it multiple groups; It doesn't double count when looking at the global view view as well !

Not sure if this used to be a limitation and if it did which version it was removed...

Cheers

Rich

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

reinoud7 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:13:57 GMT

Super. We need definitely exam the current features of OM.

Reinoud

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

raja — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:55:11 GMT

Reinoud,

The restriction exists only for configuration groups - a filer can be in only one configuration group. Otherwise Ops Manager wont know which group's configuration should be pushed to the filer.

Raj.

Re: Hierarchical Grouping

reinoud7 — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:13:16 GMT

IT's very clear that when a product change a lot, even old custumers as myself need to look again to the product.

Reinoud