Designing and Managing Behavior Models - Defining Property Groups and Properties - Creating a New Property Group -
Creating a Property      Based on an Existing Property Group

Creating a New Property Group

As you develop your network management strategy, you may need to create new property groups. For example, NerveCenter ships with a property group called Router that you can use to uniquely identify the routers on your network. However, suppose you decide that while some of your behavior models should apply to all routers, others should apply to either campus routers or backbone routers, but not both. To handle this problem, you might create two new property groups, CampusRouter and BackboneRouter. Each can be a copy of Router to which you add one unique property. For instance, you might add the property campusRouter to the property group CampusRouter and the property backboneRouter to the property group BackboneRouter. You could then assign these new property groups to the appropriate nodes.

There are three methods of creating a property group:

• You can base the new property group on an existing one. In this case, you copy an existing property group and then add one or more new properties to it. This is the technique used in the hypothetical example above.
• You can create a property group that contains the names of the base objects in one or more MIB definitions. This technique is useful when you add new hardware to your network and there is a special MIB defined for that hardware. Basing the property group on this MIB ensures that you'll meet one of the prerequisites for making the new device pollable: the base object used in the poll condition will be in the property group.
• You can create an empty property group and add properties to it one by one. Obviously, this option gives you the greatest flexibility, but it also is the most time consuming.

For further information on the three methods of creating a property group, see the sections listed below:

• Based on an Existing Property Group
• Based on the Contents of MIBs
• Adding Properties Manually