Deploying Application Management Groups

Learn how Application Management Groups are deployed and how they relate to BigFix computer groups.

When an Application Management Group is deployed, the following entities are created:

An automatic computer group.
An action for each task.

Computer groups

The Application Management Group computer group is stored at the custom site, which was created during the initial setup process. For example, if five Application Management Groups are deployed, then five automatic computer groups are created, one for each Application Management Group.

The computer group definition contains all the targets that are listed in the Application Management Group.

The computer groups use the following naming convention:

name_of_the_custom_site name_of_the_Application_Management_Group

For example, if you named the custom site as swd_app_group during the setup process and have an Application Management Group called Offer1, you can find a computer group called swd_app_group Offer1 in the swd_app_group site.

Figure 1. Computer group naming convention

Actions

The number of actions that are created upon deployment depends on the operator site. There can be one action per task per operator site. For example, a non-master operator creates two Application Management Groups and adds the same task to both groups. When the two groups are deployed, only one action is created. If another operator creates an Application Management Group and adds the same task as the first operator and deploys the group, a separate action is created. In this example, a total of two actions were created, one for each operator.

Master operators use the same operator site, so if five different master operators use the same task in their Application Management Groups, only one action is created for that task.

The actions use the following naming convention:

SWD AMG Action: title_of_the_originating_task

Each action references the ID of the automatic computer group in the custom site. For example, if you have a computer group called swd_app_group Offer1 and this computer group has ID 44. The action contains a relevance clause that checks to see if the endpoint is a member of the computer group whose ID is 44.

Deployment

To deploy an Application Management Group, select the group that you want to deploy, and click Deploy/Sync.

You might be prompted to enter your BigFix credentials twice, first for the creation of the Fixlets, and second for the creation of the computer group.

An alert messages will be displayed when the selection does not contain any Tasks or Targets.

Set the advanced options to force the program to space out the running of actions. This can help reduce the load on the network in bandwidth-intensive actions such as large downloads. It is especially useful for allowing Relays to effectively service hundreds of attached Clients. This option is mainly for mandatory and policy actions.

Each computer can have a different start time.

When the Application Management Group is deployed, the status changes to Deployed.

You can continue to add new tasks or targets to a deployed Application Management Group. However, the status changes from Deployment to Out of Sync because the Application Management Group does not get automatically updated with the new tasks or targets.

Out of Sync state

If an Application Management Group was deployed before the addition or removal of a task or target, the Application Management Group becomes out of sync.

You must deploy the Application Management Group to put it back to a synchronized state.

Click the yellow icon to view the last deployed model.