Locations

Tip

For an overview of PerformanceGuard computer grouping concepts, see Grouping of Computers.

Select ADMINISTRATION > Computer Grouping > Locations to search for and manage groups of computers. The page shows locations and groups as a tree. Use the create button to select Create location or Create user defined group, and drag groups onto a location to add them to it. Select Show empty subnets to also show network groups that don’t contain any computers.

Caution

You can only do this if you’re a PerformanceGuard administrator.

With locations and user-defined groups you can group other groups of computers into larger logical units, and view these larger logical units on the dashboard, in graphs, reports, etc.

What is a location?

Locations can contain other sub-locations as well as user-defined groups.

You can group your groups (both network groups and user-defined groups) into larger logical units. In PerformanceGuard such larger units are called user-defined groups or locations, depending on how you use them. This gives you a very large amount of flexibility when you structure your group hierarchies.

For more information on how to create Locations, see Set Up Locations.

To sum up the characteristics of locations:

• Created manually
• Static
• No limit to the number of locations you can create
• Can contain user-defined groups, subnet groups and Citrix groups as well as locations

Caution

A location must relate to at least one network group (i.e. it must contain a network group, or it must contain other locations or user-defined groups that ultimately contain at least one network group).

What is a user-defined group?

If you have installed PerformanceGuard agents on your organization’s computers, and the agents have begun reporting to PerformanceGuard, PerformanceGuard automatically sets up one or more computer groups for you. You can verify that by using the group search feature (see the following). The groups are based on the subnets that computers with agents belong to (see Network Grouping). This makes it easy for you to view data from your computers sorted by network/location.
Thus, you don’t have to set up groups yourself—unless you find that setting up your own groups will bring you some benefits. Read the questions and answers in the following to find out if it makes sense to manually create some additional groups in your organization:

Why Have Groups of Computers?

Important

Why is grouping of computers important?

Grouping is important because PerformanceGuard only keeps data for single computers for a short period of time. This is for performance and storage reasons. Computer data is aggregated to a group level (see How Does PerformanceGuard Work?), and old computer-specific data is deleted. You then only keep data at group level, so the more groups you create, the more data you get. By default all computers belong to two types of groups: the All Agents group and groups based on computers’ IP addresses and subnets. PerformanceGuard uses the IP address and subnet information to automatically create network-based groups. This means that even with no manually created groups, your computers will still be grouped, because computers are automatically placed in the correct network group based on which IP subnet they currently belong to.

Important

Why are network-based groups useful?

An example: PerformanceGuard measures response time on the computer so that you know what the actual user experience is, even with users at different physical locations with varying network bandwidth and latency. The response time is therefore a sum of network transport time from client computer to server, server response time, and network transport time for the first byte of the response to arrive back at the client. Computers at a location will typically be on the same subnet, and they will thus belong to a specific network-based group. This means that you can view response times for different physical locations simply by viewing the measurements aggregated on the network-based groups. One day users at the London location complain that the system is slow. You haven’t had any complaints from users at the Manchester location. You compare the response times from the network-based groups that represent the two locations. This way you can find out if both locations experience long response times or if it’s only a problem at the London location, and then you’ll know if there is a network/computer problem or a backend problem.

Traveling Users

Important

What if users often move between networks?

Users on the move, for example salespeople, will often use many different networks, and their computers will thus switch between different network-based groups in PerformanceGuard. You can keep track of individual computers’ Computer Network History of such groups.

Create Your Own Groups
You can create groups manually as well, for more information on how to create groups manually, see Set Up Locations.

Important

Why would I want to create groups manually?

It can sometimes be a good idea, for example if you have a user group that isn’t on the same network. It could be a small number of people at each of your locations that use a special application. In that case you can create a group containing just those users’ computers. In other words, you can group by user profiles, and this can be useful because accountants, salespeople and managing directors may use their computers differently.

Caution

If you want to create a Citrix Server group, then the name should end with a _ctx to appear in the list of Citrix Servers.

Important

If I create my own groups, can a computer belong to more than one group?

Yes, a computer can be member of multiple groups. This lets you group your computers by as many dimensions as you like.