ConnectWise Automate: Utilizing Limit to Search

Let’s review an underutilized piece of groups. Using the Limit to Search feature, we can further schedule scripts or apply remote monitors to a search within a group.

In this video, we go through where these are found and how to set up a limit to search within a group. This is super handy when keeping your remote monitors and scheduled group scripts organized. We can apply these scripts and monitors to your main service plan groups, but limit which machines get targeted.

Step by Step:

1. Today I wanted to go over scheduling monitors and or scripts based on a search on your surface plans let’s get into it.
2. So, we all have kind of dealt with some service plans if you at least probably heard the phrase the name itself is more or less an arbitrary group name.
3. It kind of just has some setup and predefined settings with the ignite setup and kind of the integration into Automate and so when you click things like your onboarding and patching it comes down into a service plan group here.
4. So again this is under the groups tab, scroll down to service plan,s and you have your two groups here for servers and workstations.
5. What I’m going to do is open up the service group here and once this loads, so we’ve got some information we’ve got the group name, the search and everything and how it’s basically making this group.
6. What I want to do though is come over to computers and either scheduled scripts or remote monitors whichever kind of you’re wanting to do.
7. And something that gets left out is this limit to search ability so one thing that’s kind of nice on the first initial setup of Automate is specifically coming under remote monitors here.
8. A lot of these services down here that say something like s-bam or even like AVG or you know DFS or DFSR these are actually limited to anywhere where those services are detected.
9. So, it’s not just every server or every machine that’s in this group it’s limited to the ones that only have it to then apply the monitor, to get it fixed, or auto restarted, or however, you want it to do something in return.
10. So, what I want to do is maybe make something like this but I’m pushing a Chrome update or pushing a Chrome install.
11. And what you want to do here is you want to first make the search so come under automation, searches, come down to advanced searches you’ll get a window that looks something like this it might be smaller bigger whatever your window looks like.
12. I’ve tossed in a quick search here but basically all I’ve done is click the plus sign to drop down a new line.
13. If I click on the blue like hyperlink text these are more or less your computer columns in the Automate database and so in this case I’m looking at the computer applications column and then I’m looking at the actual name and I just want to say anywhere where it contains the word Chrome because maybe I’m pushing out either Chrome for Mac and Windows or just Windows however you want to do it.
14. But what I would do is I would save this so what I can do is just say you know like custom slash and this is just kind of a folder thing you don’t have to do that maybe I just want to call it Alex’s Chrome search and give that a save.
15. It’ll do like a quick reload you might even get a SQL spy you’ll get this pop-up that says refresh searches may take up to a minute that’s fine.
16. So, if I move this off my window here of course we’ll be loading the cache what I want to do next depending on if I’m doing a script or monitor in this case, I’m going to be doing a script because I want to be pushing where that is either found for an update.
17. So, what I would do is come over to scripts I would find my install script let’s just say it was a custom OneNote install that looks like we have in our database here. What I can do is then on my limit to search and it may not show up because I didn’t actually close this window which you may find if you’re doing it kind of following along here.
18.  If I come down to the top here none of these have folders or I should say they’re labeled as folders and that’s what the name slash is a folder ID.
19. So, I don’t see Alex’s search up here so what I’m going to do is close and reopen the group, computers scheduled scripts, make sure my group’s here yep Alex’s chrome search, pick my script and once you hit schedule, it will pop down here so I can just hit add, and there’s my schedule.
20. And then on the left-hand side here it will actually tell you the search that it’s limited to so, anywhere where that chrome is found it would then push that script that I have chosen to fix it.
21. In this case I don’t want that to actually run I know these are just dev machines but it’s worth deleting.
22. And then same thing for remote monitors and this is always my personal recommendation if you’re going to make a service don’t just monitor any automatically started services because those can get very noisy.
23. Find the services that you do want to monitor maybe it’s your anti-virus or print spooler for example and I think that one’s even one that’s by default here.
24. But find the service you want build the monitor, so under details find the service do all of that and then limit it to where that service is actually found because you don’t want it to just alert on service missing if it’s not actually there.