Assignment Concept

An Assignment is a concept focused on grouping Policies and Binaries Packages and their deployments based on the system Role. Any managed system can be categorized in Roles by many attributes. For example: OS type, kinds of applications running, is it a productive or a test systems, server classes and so on.

Different kinds of Roles have to be monitored in a different way. Thus the IT department requires multiple set of Policies and related Binaries for every kind of Role or aspect of the system. The Assignment is a container that enables to create such sets.

Assignments provide several benefits: 

          
  •  They allow to create a group of Policies, Monitor executables and Actions that belongs to a 
       specific aspect of the monitored system.
      
  •  One-step deployment of all child elements.
      
  •  One-step un-deployment. 
      
  •  Automatic enqueue deployments or un-deployments of removed, added or renamed elements.
      
  •  Allow to check consistency of the deployed elements on remote Agents.

Deployment of an Assignment on a low level means deployment of all Polices and Binary Packages contained in selected Assignment. Logical tree folder structure has no relation to the deployment. Please note that boom Agent has no information about deployed assignment groups, but knows about all deployed Policies. To provide a status of assigned elements the boom Server uses internal data stored in the database, xml configuration files and queries to remote Agents. This allows to show the real picture of differences between Agent's reality and Server's expectations.

The handling of Binary Packages is simplified at the moment. The boom Agent does not track Binary Packages deployed on the node, so the server operates only with expectations. Extended tracking of Binary Packages is targeted to next release.

All assignments that are deployed on a remote boom Agents are stored in the boom Database. An Agent can have multiple Assignments deployed.

Assignment Group "BOOM"
For full agent functionality, deploy the Assignment Group "BOOM" to the agent, which contains the policy "BOOM_Messages" for internal messages and the package "BoomJavaMonitors" for agent specific Java classes.


Please read related sections:

Assignments in a boom GUI
Assignments Summary in a boom GUI