Collections in HP Systems Insight Manager 5.1 or greater (441487-001, January 2009)

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Introduction
A collection is simply a group of systems or events and can be viewed or used for a task. It can be
temporary or saved to be used again.
What is a collection?
History
Compaq Insight Manager 7, a predecessor of HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM), used the term
query. This term reflected its internal implementation as a database query. Attributes were specified,
and when a query was run, the results were shown on a Query Results page. The query results
could also be used for running a task. For example, All Servers, All Printers, or All Critical
Events were queries. In addition, you could create customized queries.
It is important to note that a query ran at the time of use. This meant that if systems were added or
removed from the managed network, the query results one day might be different from the results
another day. Since events occurred continuously, event queries could often yield very different results
each time they were used.
In HP SIM 4.x, groups of systems were referred to as system lists and groups of events were referred
to as event lists. These were newer terms than query, but the implementation was the same.
In HP SIM 5.0, the grouping mechanism became more powerful. In addition to specifying database
attributes, you could specify the exact systems you wanted to be included in the group. Therefore, in
addition to predefined collections, such as All Servers, and queries based on the database, you
could specify any number of specific systems and group them together. For example, SystemA,
SystemB, and SystemC might be used as print servers and make up a small group of systems that you
want grouped together. You could name this collection of systems My PrintServers.
Not only could individual systems be grouped together, but collections could be grouped together as
well. To support this new hierarchy, HP SIM supported displaying collections as trees. For example:
DataFarm
My PrintServers
SystemA
SystemB
SystemC
My FinancialServers
ServerXYZ
ServerFOO
ServerBAR
My Database Servers
Oracle Servers
ServerX
ServerY
ServerZ