One of the big advantages of PerformanceGuard is that you don't have to configure the agents that you have installed on your organization's computers. That's all taken care of automatically: When you deploy agents, they immediately connect to PerformanceGuard and get basic configurations. You can of course change those configurations later if required.

The behavior of your PerformanceGuard agents is controlled by agent configuration groups (ADMINISTRATION > Agent Configuration > Configurations). Each agent configuration group controls a number of agents. An agent can only be a member of one agent configuration group, and each agent will be associated with exactly one configuration.
PerformanceGuard comes with two default agent configuration groups:

• One for agents on computers with regular client operating systems
• One for agents on computers with server operating systems

This way, you can use separate configurations for agents on clients and servers. For example, you can keep data from servers for longer than you keep data from clients.
You can also set up additional agent configuration groups to suit your organization's needs.

View & Edit Existing Agent Configuration Groups

The table lists configuration groups that already exist.

• > Edit Group: Lets you edit the name and description of the configuration group. Also lets you delete the group.

  If you want to edit the actual agent configuration for the group, click the Edit link in the table's Configuration column instead.

  You can't delete an agent configuration group if agents are using the group's configuration. Also, you can't delete the two default agent configuration groups.

• > View Group Members: Lets you view which agents are members of the configuration group. Members will get their configurations from that configuration group.
• > Add Members: Lets you select agents that should use this configuration (that is be a member of this configuration group). Also lets you move agents to another configuration group.
• > Copy Group: Lets you copy an existing configuration group. This is useful if you want a near-identical new group: Copy an existing configuration group, make required changes, save the configuration, and you have a new configuration group without the work involved in creating it from scratch.
• Name: The name of the configuration group.
• Description: A supplementary description of the group.
• # items: The number of agents configured by this group.
• # AD Groups: Number of Active Directory groups that are synchronized to the configuration group. See also Active Directory: Synchronize Computers and Groups.
• Configuration Id: The ID for the actual configuration, that is the ID of the configuration that's actually sent to the agents—not the ID of the configuration group itself.
• Configuration: The Edit link in this column will bring you to the agent configuration group settings where you can edit the actual configuration.

• Enabled: Lets you control whether the configuration group should be active or not. If a configuration group isn't enabled, data from agents that are members of the group won't be collected.

  If for some reason you don't want data from particular agents, a quick way to achieve this is to place those agents in a disabled agent configuration group.

Create New Agent Configuration Group

To create a new agent configuration group, use the fields below the Existing Configuration Groups table:

1. Specify a Name for the new configuration group as well as a Description of it.
2. Click the Create group button.
3. The new configuration groups is added to the list of existing configuration groups (see the previous). You can now edit the configuration group and add members to it.

Active Directory Group Synchronization

PerformanceGuard has an integration with Active Directory (AD) that makes it possible for you to automatically synchronize computers in AD groups to PerformanceGuard agent configuration groups. For information about setting up such group synchronization, see Active Directory: Synchronize Computers and Groups.