Extreme Networks EPICenter 5.0, Manual

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72 EPICenter Concepts and Solutions Guide
Managing your Network Assets
Device groups can be useful in the following areas:
• Alarms: If an alarm is scoped on a device group, when the group membership changes, the alarm
scope automatically reflects that change.
• Telnet macros: If a Telnet macro has a device group execution context, you can run the macro on all
members of the device group by selecting the device group node in the Component Tree and
executing the macro. Similarly, in the Macro Player, you can select a device group in the Component
Tree, select all devices in the group, and run a macro on the complete set of devices.
• Bulk modify of device contact information: If you group your devices by the commonality of the
device contact information, in the
Modify Devices and Device Groups window, you can select the
device group, select all devices in the set, and then change device contact information for all the
devices in the group in a single action.
Monitoring Critical Links with Port Groups
As with devices, you can also organize ports into groups using the Grouping Manager. Port groups can
include ports from many different devices, and can be used as the scope for alarm definitions, as well as
in the Real-Time Statistics applet to monitor utilization and error statistics on the ports in a group.
As an example, you might create a port group that includes the EDP ports (uplink ports) from a set of
core devices in your network. You can then use the Real-Time Statistics applet to monitor the utilization
and errors for those ports as a single display, even though the ports in the port group exist on different
devices in your network. You could also define a critical alarm triggered by an SNMP Link Down event
that has the port group as its scope. Then if one of the uplink ports goes down, a critical alarm will be
triggered. However, if other ports on those same devices go down, they will not trigger the alarm.
Port groups are created in the Grouping Manager rather than the Inventory Manager. The ports in a
group can be a mix of port types and can come from many different devices. For example, a port group
made up of EDP ports might contain one port from each of many different devices.
Figure 32: A port group defined in the Grouping Manager