Grouping Devices
Using device groups in WhatsUp Gold helps you to:
- Organize devices into easy to browse and selectable groups.
- Administrative groups for reporting purposes.
- Group devices by partner/client/department.
- Quickly find and diagnose problems within your network environment.
- Much more...
Note: Creating/modifying device groups requires specific user permissions. For more information, see the topic titled Administering Users and User Groups.
In addition to creating a number of dynamic groups automatically, the application also allows you to create as many device groups as needed to organize your network in a way that is meaningful to you and to fit your specific monitoring needs.
All devices discovered on your network are placed into a single dynamic group named 'All devices' by default. Additional groups are created automatically when SQL queries search for devices based on user-specified criteria during discovery. These are referred to as dynamic groups because group membership can change automatically based on the data WhatsUp Gold receives from the devices therein.
There are two types of dynamic groups that exist in WhatsUp Gold: Layer 2 dynamic groups 
and WhatsUp Gold dynamic groups 
. These advanced dynamic groups do not have customizable maps available, but allow you to specify rules for dynamic membership of devices in the group.
For Layer 2 dynamic groups, you may assign user rights and specify membership based on device properties such as Role, Name or IP, and choose to include connected devices. For WhatsUp Gold dynamic groups, user access is not configurable and membership is determined with a rule builder which can access status, properties, and configurations such as assigned credential types.
WhatsUp Gold also creates a static group each time you perform a discovery scan which contains every device found during that scan.