Endpoint organization is crucial. Without it, visibility is blurred, gaps occur in endpoint updates or patches, and you can throw strategy out the window without the necessary endpoint details to make calculated and comprehensive decisions.
Tags are essentially attributes or name identifiers that help associate an endpoint, or group of endpoints, logically. Tags also speed the effort of removing endpoints from actions that are not needed or could be detrimental. Reporting is much easier too when all endpoints are accounted for and tracked using tags.
Tagging makes it easy for IT to search for, organize, deploy, include or exclude, patch, update, configure, and overall manage your endpoints.
Coordinating Tags: Another Step in Getting Your Shi++ Together
How IT teams use tags for coordinating and taking action on endpoints can vary greatly. Some examples include:
Tags for organizing unrelated endpoints
Often, users are spread across different groups and time zones, but even these disparate endpoints may have similar OS, apps, etc. that would cause them to be grouped for specific actions. Conversely, tags can be used to remove endpoints from actions. For example, tags associated with executive laptops can be removed from updates that occur during the work week to avoid interruptions.
Ease of logically or organizationally grouping endpoints
Location-based, org-based, time-zone-based, or role-based are just a few examples of creating identifiable tags for your endpoints. As a typical user example, let’s say Sally, works remotely on the West Coast (WestC), within the Purchasing team (Purchasing), as a buyer (Buyer). Her devices may therefore be tagged with all these various identifiers. When tasks come up, her device can easily be pulled into these processes if the associated tags to her device fall into these necessary actions.
Automating actions
The more decisive you can be in your automated actions, the faster and more exact your actions can be. For example, when executing an automated policy within Automox, you can target devices by their tags with filters applied:
For example, endpoints with a “Servers” tag will be included in the targeting efforts above while endpoints with a “Denver Office” will be excluded from the action. Once the filters are selected, Automox previews the endpoints falling within these set filters to validate your targeting efforts.
For example, endpoints with a “Servers” tag will be included in the targeting efforts above while endpoints with a “Denver Office” will be excluded from the action. Once the filters are selected, Automox previews the endpoints falling within these set filters to validate your targeting efforts.
Align tags across tools
As you may have already noticed, many tools provide the option to create tags. This is helpful until you realize that most of the tools have tags created by different groups, or from previous tenures, that do not line up. The same endpoint may have very different tags depending on the tools you are working from.
Thankfully Automox has several clever methods of getting tags on the same page.
Ways to Align Tags within Automox
Automox makes it easy to pull in and sync tags already created within other tools. A few examples include:
Targeting by Organizational Unit (OU)
For Windows users, pulling in tags from your Active Directory is a snap. Simply use the targeting filter Active Directory Organizational Unit (AD OU) when executing a policy. This allows you to filter endpoints based on your AD structure with the AU OU information collected as the endpoint is scanned with the filter allowing you to match tags. This feature also does not require Active Directory Domain Controller access as we’re pulling the AD OU information directly from each device.
Lansweeper and Automox Keep your Endpoint Visibility in Lock-Step
We’ve partnered with Lansweeper, an industry leader in the discovery and management of your technology assets. The Automox and Lansweeper alliance includes a range of automations, or Worklets, that allow you to do more with your Lansweeper Cloud (Starter, Enterprise, and Pro edition) license.
Our inaugural Worklet automation script allows for the dynamic creation of Automox tags based on an endpoint's details that have been captured within an existing Lansweeper Cloud instance. Simply search and navigate to the Tag Automox Devices with Lansweeper Data Worklet.
Driven through our APIs, this Worklet only needs to target and run on a single Lansweeper “host” device. Once deployed, the Worklet queries this individual device to scan for and capture key data from Lansweeper, including serial numbers and their related tags. The Automox API will then automatically correlate serial numbers that reside in both platforms, and those with identified serial number matches are automatically synchronized with the Lansweeper-defined tags within Automox creating parity across the two platforms.
Tagging may seem monotonous or an afterthought at times when times are busy, when, in fact, their underlying value cannot be overstated. Tags are an organizational capability that can take your IT team to new heights of organization and ease of use. Using tags effectively and across tools can save time when you are pressed for time or under the microscope to get a task done fast.
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