LogicMonitor supports Instance groups to show relationships between instances. Overview graphs are shown per instance group, rather than including all instances.

For example, using  instance groups, LogicMonitor could show disk instances as in the figure below:

Manual Instance Group management

If the Group Method selected for a wildcard datasource is Manual, the user can manually create/delete groups and assign instances to them.

To manually create/delete instance groups, click the tools icon alongside a datasource in the host view, then choose Manage Instance groups.

After creating groups, you can drag-n-drop instances among groups. You can also click the tool icon next to the instance group, and select "Set Membership" to assign instances to the instance group. This is useful where there are too many instances, and the target you wish to drag the instance into is not visible.

Automatic Instance Group management

LogicMonitor will automatically create/delete groups and assign instances to the correct group if you specify an automated Group Method for a wildcard datasource:

LogicMonitor supports 3 automated Group Methods:

• Netapp: This is only appropriate for NetApp systems. LogicMonitor will automatically create an instance group for each disk aggregate. All volumes or physical disks will be assigned to the aggregates to which they belong.  This is very useful for identifying the impact of volumes with excessive IO on other volumes on the same aggregate.
• Regular Expression - The parameters supported are: [useValue="name"|"value"] [dynamicGroup="a regex with capturing"] [groupName1="regex1" groupName2="regex2" ...]
  • useValue (optional) - it indicates which property (name or value) of an instance will be evaluated. If not specified, the instance name will be used.
  • dynamicGroup (optional) - if you want to extract the group name from the instance names/values, you can specify a regular expression with capturing. For example,  Linux hosts may have some set of physical disks sda, sdb, hda, hdc, etc, each with different file system devices.  To group each device on the physical disk it is on (e.g. sda1, sda2 and sda3 under an 'sda' group) without requiring advance knowledge of all possible groups, you can set dynamicGroup="^(.d.)" which will return group name sda for sda1 and sda2, group name hdb for hdb1 and hbd2, and so on.
  • static group assignment - For a predefined set of groups, you can assign instances to them based on the name/value of the instances. The parameters are the group name, then a regular expression - any instance that matches the regular expression will be a member of the group. (Instances can be a member of more than one group, if they match more than one regular expression.) For example, a Linux host has physical disks sda, sdb, and sdc and Logical Volume Manager (LVM) disks dm0, dm1, dm2.  To put all LVM disks into group lvm, and all physical disks into group physical, you can put physical="sd.*"  lvm="dm.*".
• NetScaler - used only for Citrix Netscalers, this grouping method automatically associates Services with the Load Balancing VIPs they are a member of.

You cannot manually create or delete instance groups if an automated Group Method is selected.