Groups allow monitors to be arranged into logical lists best suited for the purpose of the organization being monitored. A Monitor can be a member of multiple groups allowing maximum flexibility in configuration.

In large installations Status Reports would become very slow* if viewed as a list of individual monitors. To avoid this problem, Status reports are created for Groups. Members of a Group can only be viewed by first selecting the parent Group. As a rule of thumb, for large installations, monitor items should be distributed as evenly as possible across all Groups.

Some examples of grouping criteria might be:

• Critical availability
• Physical location
• Responsibility
• Bandwidth

A group has two lists of monitor items:

1. Critical Services - These monitor items are "outside" the group, and all those within the group depend upon their availability.
2. Members - These are the monitor items that make up the group