Cluster Management

Clusters provide a way to group related hosts for streamlined management and batch operations. This guide covers cluster creation, management, and common usage patterns.

Creating Clusters

Navigate to Host Management → Clusters → Create Cluster:

1. Name — A unique, descriptive name (e.g., prod-web-servers)
2. Description — Optional notes about the cluster’s purpose
3. Host Selection — Add hosts manually or by tag filter

Tag-based Dynamic Groups

Instead of manually adding hosts, you can use tag filters to create dynamic groups:

env:production AND role:web

Hosts matching the filter are automatically included. When new hosts are tagged, they join the cluster automatically.

Cluster Operations

Once a cluster is defined, you can perform operations on all its hosts simultaneously:

• Batch Script Execution — Run any script across all cluster hosts
• Rolling Updates — Execute scripts with configurable concurrency and delay between hosts
• Health Overview — See aggregated health metrics for the entire cluster
• Bulk Tag Management — Apply or remove tags from all hosts in the cluster

Common Cluster Patterns

By Environment

production  → all hosts tagged env:production
staging     → all hosts tagged env:staging
development → all hosts tagged env:development

By Service Role

web-servers → role:web
db-servers  → role:database
workers     → role:worker
cache       → role:cache

By Region

us-east  → region:us-east-1
eu-west  → region:eu-west-1

Cluster Dashboard

Each cluster has a dashboard showing:

Metric	Description
Total Hosts	Number of hosts in the cluster
Online	Hosts with active agent connections
Avg CPU	Average CPU utilization across the cluster
Avg Memory	Average memory usage
Recent Tasks	Last 10 batch executions

Best Practices

• Use consistent tagging conventions across your infrastructure
• Prefer tag-based dynamic groups over static host lists for production clusters
• Set up cluster-specific alerting thresholds
• Document cluster purposes in the description field
• Review cluster membership regularly to remove decommissioned hosts