Dynamic groups might ring a bell if you’ve been with Lansweeper for a longer period of time. They used to be a simpler way to create a simple report, but were rather limited with the options you could use. Now they are back in a new (and improved) way!
Grouping assets has always been a useful way to find certain assets quicker, scope your dashboards, views or reports easily and even do additional asset classification. Now you’ll have more control than every to create and device your assets into whatever group you want and use that information throughout Lansweeper.
Back in the good old days, creating dynamic asset groups was easy, but limited. Too limited. Feature requests to add new options were endless and when it came to moving this functionality to your Lansweeper Site, we figured a different approach was better.
Why create an entire new feature, with endless follow-up feature requests, when you already have functionality that can do it? Flowbuilder is perfectly suited to create automations that check your assets and depending on the result, add it to a certain group.
Additionally, it can dynamically create groups, it has much more data it can work with too!
Ofcourse I wouldn’t bring this up if I didn’t have something already ready to go. Something to get you started on your own journey of dynamic groups. So two templates are live in the marketplace right now focused on dynamic groups.
This will be the main template you can use as an example. If you want to create your own groups start with this one!
By default it will put all your servers in a Servers group and create a custom field to record when an assets was last checked by this workflow.
However, the real power is in adjusting it for whatever you need, so I’ll go through the steps you might want to adjust one by one. I will skip steps you don’t need to touch at all!
One key resource I’ll bring up is the Lansweeper Workflow Assistant AI skill that you can download and use to help you adjust and create workflows.
The trigger just changes how often this workflow runs. That doesn’t mean that every single assets is always checked. This actually determines how often the next batch of 500 assets is checked.
Here you enter what the name of the group needs to be. This is later in the flow references a lot for example to create the custom field to keep track of the last changed.
This controls how often an asset is re-checked. By default this is every 3 days. If you want this to be more frequent, change the value.
This means that even you run the workflow every hour in batches of 500 assets, if it gets checked again within 3 days, the asset will be skipped.
This step has a box titled Filters. I highly recommend checking our documentation or using the Lansweeper workflow assistant AI skill to help you create the right filter for your List Assets step. Sadly not all fields can be filtered on, but I always recommend to filter this step as much as possible as it will make the workflow run faster.
If you want to populate an asset group based on data not available in this filter, add those data points to the Additional Asset Details list at the bottom.
This is actually a generic filter step. You can rename this to whatever you are actually filtering for and is only needed if after the List Assets step, you indeed want to filter on extra data that you added to the Additional Asset Details list.
This step requires a Filter Function. Again I would highly recommend you use the Lansweeper workflow assistant AI skill here to tell it exactly what you want to filter for.
Extra Pro Tip:
If you’ve done a test run and your filter isn’t quite working, download the output of your List Assets step and give it to your AI assistant so it knows exactly the format of what it is filtering
The Dynamic Groups Subtype is a template that automatically creates and assigns assets to a group with the sub asset type they belong to. A lesser known data point that adds additional classification to your devices.
It works similar to the other template, every execution checks 500 assets, and assets are only re-checked every 3 days.
This gives you an additional way to quickly sort through the vast list of devices within your environment and have additional classification on every single device. Also allowing you to use this in any of your dashboards:
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