Cisco Cisco Process Orchestrator 3.0 Guida Utente

Target groups are collections of targets. Often automation might need to run against all machines in a 
collection, or against one of the machines in a collection. Target groups provide this functionality. 

Adapters can provide target groups to leverage grouping definitions where they exist. For example:

Active Directory OU—Customers are frustrated when they must recode their grouping information 
into yet another product. The Active Directory adapter seeks grouping information where it is 
defined. For example, an Active Directory target group looks up computers in some organizational 
unit (OU) in the directory.

Target Type group—Using queries of their attributes, the Process Orchestrator provides type-based 
groupings of targets. For example, use a target group to group all targets of a given type, or to 
perform additional filtering to pattern match against a field in the target definition.

Virtual group—A target group can be a virtual group. Use a virtual group to specify an explicit list 
of targets, providing the capability to manually select targets and establish group membership. A 
virtual group can also allow the inclusion of other target groups so that group membership can be 
defined hierarchically. For example, a virtual group called “Production switches” might include all 
members of the “Houston data center switches” group as well as all members of the “London data 
center switches” group, but not members of the “Engineering lab switches.”

A default target for a process can specify a target group along with a target selection algorithm:

Typically, a target selection algorithm chooses one or more members of a target group to specify the 
target instances on which the process will act.

At runtime the target selection algorithm resolves the then-present members of the target group and 
selects a target. 

When a user, CLI, or northbound API call interactively runs a process ad-hoc (on demand), the user 
can accept the default target specified in the process or override it with a specific target.

Where a target selection algorithm resolves to multiple target instances, the engine spins up separate 
process instances for each target. Thus at runtime, a process instance has a specific target on which 
it will act, against which the process workflow encodes actions.

Many operating system and application actions require credentials. To run a SQL query against a 
database, for example, requires database credentials with read access to the relevant database tables. 
These credentials are defined in runtime users. 

Targets have default runtime users. Often activities will leverage this feature to avoid specifying 
credentials activity by activity (see 

). Cisco’s automation packs use this concept to 

reduce customer configuration and ship processes that customers do not need to alter.