Why are we limited to editing host groups through the CLi post installation of OneAgent?

[rsmsdk]

Hi

During the last year we have progressed nicely with our Dynatrace Saas implementation, and we are adding alot of value to our business.

When we first started to roll out OneAgent on our infrastructure, we did not feel confident in configuring Host Groups straight away. We wanted to discuss how we should group our hosts, and thought this was something we could get back to later on... easily.

Turns out, we can not 😓

Today I wanted to edit the CPU saturation anomaly detection for 18 host that run heavy batch jobs each night. I looked for an easy way to bulk modify the anomaly setting, and found out it could be done by editing on a Host Group level.

I then looked up how to create and add to a new Host Group, and found no other option than to do it through the OneAgent CLi on each host.

Why is that? Everything else in Dynatrace invites you to group and filter based on tags. The whole CLi adventure for this simple grouping of hosts seem unnecessarily complicated.

We do not have access to our production infrastructure, and this now limits us to create a change request towards our outsourcing partner that manage the host operations.

Is it possible that Dynatrace in the future might add this configuration option, so that we are able to do it from the GUI? I looked for a RFE with no success.

Best regards

Rasmus

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

Hi @rsmsdk  I think you can change the host group assignment via oneagentctl. Have a look here:

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/oneagentctl#host-groups

Change host group assignment

Use the --set-host-group parameter to change the host group assignment.

To assign the host to MyHostGroup:

• Linux or AIX:
  ./oneagentctl --set-host-group=MyHostGroup
• Windows:
  .\oneagentctl.exe --set-host-group=MyHostGroup

[rsmsdk]

Thank you. That still require access to the host and is overall inconvenient compared to all the other stuff you can configure straight from the GUI.

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

@rsmsdk actually this is coming soon, see the product idea

[rsmsdk]

Whaat 😀 that is great news, thank you so much for sharing!

[Julius_Loman]

You are welcome! Actually, the search includes product ideas only if you are logged in the community. That's probably you could not find the existing idea.

[The_AM]

Please keep in mind that it is best practice to get the host group assigned at deployment time and not to change it.

It also affects process group detection, so changing a host group will cause process entity IDs to change and lose the connection to historical information.

It is unclear at this stage if the UI & API update will have any positive effect in that regard (such as auto-connecting old process groups to new ones).

[rsmsdk]

Very important observation. This had a big impact on our configuration.

[fstekelenburg · Accepted solution]

Host group assignment can now also be changed through Deployment status > OneAgents > Bulk action.
Where you can even type a new name to create and assign a new host group.

[Don_Meuth]

We have a similar issues, we are in Google Cloud and have many Google CloudRun applications.  Since the aget is not directly installed, but is unzipped and then referenced to the shared object, there is no way to declare before nor update afterwords because oneagentctl is NOT installed and since there are serverless applications cannot be logged onto as well.  We need a way to update the HostGroup for these to set up groups.  But since scaling occurs frequently we need a way to have a RULE that says something like, if Host Name begins with "CloudRun" then assign to host Group Google_CloudRun_Hosts.  We have not found a way, to do this.  What we need is something like the process group rules configuration.