Working with Collections

A Collection is a virtual group of Network Nodes for analyzing your inventory data from different view points. You can quickly switch between Collections to zoom in on different aspects of your computer infrastructure.

Alloy Discovery supports Computer Collections, Chromebook Collections, and Network Device Collections.

Alloy Discovery has two system Collections:

• All Computers — includes all audited Computers across all Sites.
• All Chromebooks — includes all audited Chromebooks across all Sites.
• All Network Devices — includes all discovered Network Devices across all Sites.

There are two methods for including Network Nodes into Collections:

• Dynamic inclusion — Alloy Discovery populates Collections dynamically based on the filtering criteria involving various hardware and software properties of audited node (e.g. OS version, CPU type, RAM size, percentage of free disk space, detected SSD, etc.). Alloy Discovery contains a number of Collections with pre-defined inclusion rules: Linux, Mac OS, MS Office 2007, MS SQL Server 2008, Virtual Machines, Hypervisors, Windows 7, etc. There are also generic collections, such as MS Office (all), MS SQL Server (all), Windows (all), and Windows Server (all).
• Static inclusion — You explicitly assign individual Network Nodes to a particular Collection. For example, you can use static inclusion to independently analyze and report inventory data from multiple networks or subdivisions within your organization.

Each Collection may employ either dynamic or static inclusion method, or a combination of both methods.