Black List

WAS THIS PAGE HELPFUL? Leave Feedback

Overview

The Black List feature allows you to stop Cloud Hub discovered hosts from being included in the system monitoring. Hosts that are black listed will not be displayed, monitored, distribute notifications, be counted against the system license limit, and overall be reported on within the system. This can be useful for hosts that are not currently being used but may be in the future. Black List hosts are still seen by the system but because they are added to the list they will be hidden in the system operations.

Cloud Hub consults this list for references to hosts that will not be discovered and added to the Foundation database and used against the license limit. This is useful when Cloud Hub discovers devices like templates and test servers in the same location where production devices are found. To start monitoring black listed hosts again, you would remove the host from the list.

Blacklisting at present is only effective for hosts discovered by Cloud Hub. Hosts monitored by Smart Cacti Feeder, Nagios, Syslog, SNMPTrap, SCOM Feeder, etc may not be blacklisted (entries made in the Black List table will be ignored).

Steps

Adding hosts

VIDEO

Follow these steps to add a host to the Black List. As previously mentioned hosts that are black listed will not be displayed, monitored, distribute notifications, be counted against the system license limit, and overall be reported on within the system.

1. As an Administrator, select GroundWork Administration > Device Management > Black List.
2. Select the + icon and the New Black List Record dialog will be displayed. Enter the exact host name to add to the black list.
3. Click the Add button.
4. Go to the Status view and the host will not be displayed, you can also search for the host using the Search tab.
   
   Figure: New Black List Record dialog
   

Adding regular expressions

Regular expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. In JavaScript, regular expressions are also objects. You can select several hosts by using a regex in the Host Name field for the Black List feature. Below we show an example of how to use the Black List feature with a regex. It is recommended to use java/javascript regex patterns instead of using file path wildcard syntax. For additional information regarding regular expressions you may want to visit these links:

• Online Regular Expression Tool
• Zytrax Info Regular Expression User Guide
• MDN Regular Expressions Reference
• Java Class Pattern Reference

Example

• In this first image we show the Status view for a VMware Cloud Hub connection. You can see the host group NET:VM Network which lists hosts that include the string "ELK" and "elk".
  
  Figure: Status view of host group
  

• Next we use the regular expression (elk-)\w+ where (captures the group character codes), \w matches any word character (alphanumeric and underscore), and + matches one or more of the preceding token.
  
  Figure: RegEx (elk-)\w+
  

• This captures all of the hosts in our example except ELK-GW7-1 and elk_mgmt_ubuntu_14. You can see the remaining hosts by searching for "elk".
  
  Figure: Searching for hosts
  

Additional examples

Removing Black List records

To start monitoring the black listed hosts again, you would remove the host from the list.

1. As an administrator, select GroundWork Administration > Device Management > Black List. You may also use the Filter Hosts box to search for specific hosts to manage.
2. On the left, check the host name box for each of the host records to be removed.
3. Click the Trashcan icon, then click Delete.
   
   Figure: Check host to delete Black List record