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Host-Group Management

Hosts in the managed environment can be assigned to host groups to help the management of large host environments. Possible use cases for host groups include:

  • Host groups can be used for semantically organizing the managed environment, allowing you to easily find and perform jobs for all the hosts in a specific host group.

  • Permissions for Key Manager administrators can be set per host group, which lets you control what management actions each Key Manager administrator is able to perform on the hosts in the host group.

  • Host and host-credential settings (such as automatic scan intervals and job-timeout periods) can be set per host group.

Host groups can be organized hierarchically, in a similar manner to tree structures. Each host group can have one parent group, and any number of subgroups. Subgroups automatically inherit any permissions and settings from their ancestor groups. You can also overwrite inherited permissions and settings for a subgroup by explicitly setting another value in that subgroup.

A host can belong to one host group per host-group hierarchy. This means that a host cannot belong to any parent or subgroups of the host groups it is currently part of. Hosts can however be moved to parent and subgroups. Also, a host can simultaneously belong to host groups from different hierarchies.

A host belonging to multiple host groups inherits the permissions and settings of all the host groups it belongs to (keep in mind that these host groups may additionally inherit permissions and settings from their ancestor groups). In situations where a setting has been defined in multiple host groups, the host inherits this setting from the host group with the highest priority.

You can manage host groups on the Hosts→Groups page.

Host groups can also be managed using the command-line client (detailed in Host-group Commands):

ssh-mgr-client list-host-groups
ssh-mgr-client count-host-groups
ssh-mgr-client create-host-group
ssh-mgr-client modify-host-group

Managing Host-Group Members​

On the Hosts page, you can set which host group(s) each host belongs to. This following host actions are available for setting host-group memberships: Select the hosts you want to add to a host group, then perform an Add To Group action on the target host(s).

  • Add to Group: Add the target host(s) to a host group.

  • Move in Hierarchy: Remove the target host(s) from a host group, and add them to an ancestor or descendant group.

  • Remove from Group: Remove the target host(s) from a host group.

note

A host can only be present in one host group per host-group hierarchy.

You can also use the command-line client to manage host-group memberships (detailed in Host-group Commands):

ssh-mgr-client add-hosts-to-group
ssh-mgr-client remove-hosts-from-group