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Classifying objects of the same type
Overview
Nexthink distinguishes ten types of objects to describe your IT infrastructure:
When you create an object-based investigation or widget, you target a particular type of object. Object types are predefined and their number is fixed. However, you might want not to target all the objects of a type, but only a custom-defined subset. To that end, Nexthink introduces the concept of Categories. Categories work one level below the object type, defining classes of objects within objects of the same type. For instance, you can create different classes of users, devices or applications according to the processes and policies in your own organization. The ability to define your own subtypes of objects lets you create investigations and widgets specifically targeted to those subtypes.
Each category applies thus to only one type of object. The category defines a set of classes, each one identified by a keyword, that partitions the group of all the objects of the given type into disjoint subsets. Therefore, at most one keyword per category can be assigned to an object in an Engine. If an object does not fit into any of the classes defined by the category, the object gets assigned the empty keyword for that category.
Tagging objects
The process of assigning keywords to objects is called tagging. A tag is a label consisting of a pair Category:Keyword that is attached to the object. The word tag is therefore commonly used as synonym for keyword in Nexthink parlance.
Tagging can be manual, automatic (based on a set of auto-tagging rules) or semi-automatic (based on tags loaded manually from a CSV file).
Displaying the tags of objects
For object-based investigations, optionally display a column for each available category. Add the desired category-related columns either when editing the options of the investigation or while navigating through the list of results. The columns of categories show the keywords assigned to each object.
If a keyword is assigned to an object as a result of automatic tagging, a small icon with the letter A appears to the right of the name of the keyword. If you tag the object manually or you import the tag from a file, no special indication is given.
Displaying multiple tags in Cross-Engine scenarios
In an installation with multiple Engines, an object that is present in several Engines can be tagged differently on each Engine. This is seldom for keywords assigned with auto-tagging rules, but it is common if an automatically assigned keyword is manually overridden in one Engine only.
Thus, when examining the results of a Cross-Engine investigation on the List (all entities) view, an object may display more than one keyword in a category column. All the keywords assigned to the object are listed in sequence, separated by a comma from one another. In this case, an icon with the letter A appears to the right of the list of keywords only if all the keywords have been automatically assigned on every Engine.
Device objects are special though because a single device is identified as a different object by each Engine. Therefore, in the case of devices, at most one keyword per category is allowed, even when considering Cross-Engine results.
Platforms and automatic tagging of devices
When you automatically tag devices based on the value of one of their attributes, remember that not all attributes are present in devices of different platforms.
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