Managing data visibility groups

Data Visibility Groups (DVGs) limit what events (data) a specific user can monitor. For example, when multiple users have access to a single server, a DVG (together with a server group) provides a way to segment the data a user can view and act upon for that server.

The high-level process for setting up data visibility groups is as follows:
  1. Specify criteria for segmenting data as needed for your organization.

    For example, you can segment data into different lines of business (LOBs) or different functional areas, such as accounting or payroll. When events match on any criteria for a data visibility group, that data visibility group name is put into the DVG attribute of the event.

  2. After you define data visibility groups, you assign them to roles, thus restricting the roles.
    A role can have a server group restriction or data visibility group restriction or both server group and data visibility group restrictions. When restricted roles are assigned to objects, you can elect to either make the object visible to all users or only restricted users in the selected roles.
    Tip: To restrict a user to all the activities from one or more servers, you can use the server group restriction. With the server group option, you create a server group with one or more servers and associate that group to a user role.
  3. The roles are then assigned to users, making the users data visibility restricted.
Keep the following considerations in mind when you are working with data visibility groups:
  • If you delete a DVG that has alerts or alert comments that are tagged with that DVG name, then those alerts, check mark icons, and comments are no longer visible when the alerts listing is refreshed.
  • Do not reuse names of deleted DVGs. Reuse of DVG names can lead to exposure of data to users who are not authorized to view that data because DVG tags on events remain in the database.
CAUTION:
Under the current IBM® Sterling Control Center Monitor architecture, data visibility group (DVG) usage has limitations. One limitation is slow page load times, which are specific to customers that have a high volume of events in their database. If you have more than 10 million events in your database, consider withholding use of DVGs. If you decide to use DVGs, slow response times can be expected. On occasion, a page can fail to load causing a timeout error.