A Monitoring Group is a list of one or more servers or IP addresses.
For all Argent products, Monitoring Groups define the servers and devices to be processed – Monitoring Groups are shared by all Argent products. The same Monitoring Group can be used by any number of Relators in any number of Argent products.
By not having to specify servers and devices in the actual Relators, and by sharing Monitoring Groups, only the Monitoring Groups need change when a new production server comes online (or an existing server is replaced), rather than having to change hundreds of occurrences of the same server name or device address.
There is no limit to the ways Monitoring Groups can be created.
You can have a Monitoring Group consisting of the servers and devices in the Accounting Department, and another Monitoring Group of those in the Engineering Department.
These same servers and devices can be in different Monitoring Groups may list servers by application – all production Exchange servers in one Monitoring Group, all production Oracle servers in another Monitoring Group, all test Linux machines in another Monitoring Group, all network printers in another Monitoring Group.
Master Catalog
Before a server or a device can be added to a Monitoring Group, it must first be cataloged. This is done using the Argent Master Catalog.
Servers and devices can be enumerated in different ways, such as using the Active Directory, or the more traditional network scan APIs.
There is no right or wrong way to scan for servers and devices — different Customers have different needs, this why different scanning facilities are provided.
Once a server or device is cataloged in the Master Catalog, it can then be added to one or more Monitoring Groups.