Part 3: Group machines by function

What Groups do

You can create any number of machine groups, and you can divide up your machines between them, by dragging and dropping.

You also have the option to put restrictions on groups regarding which commands can be executed on the machines in it.

For example, you can have a group for Workstations, and Nodes. On the workstation group you can disable the stop / restart machine command, so you can avoid someone accidentally disrupting your work.

The groups on the dashboard can be opened / closed, so you can view only the relevant machines and their information.

Action Steps: Creating a Group and configuring it

1. Go to the Settings menu and open the “Group management” accordion.

2. Click on “Create new group”

3. Open the new group, and configure it:

GROUP NAME

You will see this name on the Dashboard. You can rename the “Default” group.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

You can enable / disable specific performance indicators for groups of machines. For example if you don’t use GPU rendering, you can disable those columns to save space on the Dashboard.

AVAILABLE APPLICATIONS

You’ve added monitored applications to your machine(s) in the previous part of the tutorial. If you put a machine with a set of monitored applications in a group, then those applications will show up here. You can Enable / Disable showing the columns for the applications for the group on the dashboard.

DISABLE RESTART/SHUTDOWN

You can enable this feature to make machines in it resistant to shutdown / restart command from the Dashboard. This is useful for workstation machine groups to avoid losing unsaved changes in scenes by a colleague accidentally restarting your machine.

ALERT WHEN SHUTTING DOWN

By enabling this if you send a Restart / Shutdown command to a machine in this group, then a popup window will appear where a user of the machine could cancel the restart / shutdown. This is useful for groups of computers that is used part time as a workstation and part time a node, and it is reasonable to assume that restarting the machine will be required from time to time.

MACHINE AUTOFREE

If you enable this option, then in this group Autofree will be enabled. This makes machines reserved by someone automatically “free themselves” if their CPU/GPU usage will stay below 7% for the time specified in this option.

SET AS DEFAULT

This is the group where newly added machines will appear by default.

DELETE GROUP

You can remove a group at will, the machines in it will be placed into the group marked as the “Default”