Quick tip – using regular expressions in a dynamic group
Here is a quick tip on using a regular expression when creating a group.
OpsMgr dynamic inclusion rules are case sensitive.
If I have a group that I want to contain all computers that START with “OM”…. I can use the following expression:
The “^” tells regex to start a new line… without this – it will search the entire computername for “OM” instead of only servers with a name that starts with “OM”. This shows the following group membership:
However – this is not all my “OM” servers. This is because when some were built, they used a lower case name. If I change the dynamic inclusion expression to “^om” I will only see the lower case servers (the NetBIOS Computer name is lower case… not the display name as shown):
Ok – how do I get them ALL in the same group?
There are a couple ways.
One way is to “OR” the two regex queries:
Bingo!
Another way – courtesy of Tim Helton – is to use the regex modifier (?i:) to make it case insensitive:
Which yields:
This should make dynamic groups a bit easier. We can expand this to add the HealthService Watcher objects, which is typical for groups that we will scope notifications to:
Which yields all my Windows Computers, and their Health Service Watcher components.
