Host Groups and Tags both organize the hosts in your workspace.
Use a Host Group when you want to act on a set of hosts together, such as a web tier, one client's estate, or a patch window. Use a Tag to describe a host, such as its role or its owner. Most teams have a few Host Groups and many Tags.
Host Groups
Host Groups appear in the panel beside the host list, under All Hosts and Unassigned. Each one shows how many hosts it contains. The counts follow your current search and filters.
Create a Host Group
Select Hosts in the left navigation.
Click + beside Host Groups.
Enter a name for the Host Group and select the hosts to add and click Create Group. Each name must be unique in the workspace.
A host can belong to more than one host group.
Manage a Host Group
Host Groups have a menu. Click the three dots:
You can choose:
Connect Group to connect every host in the group over SSH and add them to one LuumenAI conversation, so you can work on all of them in one place. It does not open a terminal for each host.
Edit Hosts to add or remove hosts.
Rename to change the name. The new name must also be unique.
Delete Group to delete the host group. Its hosts stay in your workspace.
Group actions apply to every Host in the group, including Hosts your search or filters hide.
Tags
A Tag is a free-form label on a Host. A Host can have as many Tags as you need.
To tag one host, open the host's menu, choose Edit, and add tags under Tags. Click Save.
Filter and Select Hosts
Filter the host list by Connection Type, OS, and Tags. The search box matches host names, addresses, and tags. Filters combine: choose Linux and the tag production to see only Linux hosts tagged production. If you choose two tags, the list shows only hosts that have both.
The checkbox in the list header selects the hosts loaded so far, up to the first 50. To select every host that matches your filters, use select all in the selection bar. You can then tag or delete them all at once.
Best Practices and Use Cases: When to Use Host Groups or Tags
Tags describe a Host. Host groups are what you act on. If it describes the Host, use a Tag. If you will run something against it, Use a Host Group.
Tags:
Tag each host with its environment and role, such as
productionandweb, then filtering on two Tags will find the production web tier.Tags are plain labels, so they can carry whatever helps you filter: a team name, a datacenter, a patch state during a rollout.
In SAP systems, you can tag each host with its SID, tier, and role to find the app servers for one system.
Host Groups:
Create a group for the hosts in a change ticket and name it after the ticket, for example CHG-4112. When you run the change, the run and its approval apply only to the hosts in that group.
When patching a fleet, use a canary group and wave groups. Each wave is one run and one approval, and a rollback runs against the same group as the forward run.
In SAP systems you can group the app servers for one SID to stop, patch, and start them together, or group the affected PRD app servers across the landscape so one run covers every system.