Detection by Host Type

When to Use

For each host to monitor with MetricsHub, the user will provide 2 critical attributes:

• host.name: the host name of the system to monitor
• host.type: the type of host (Windows, Linux, AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Network, Storage, Management, etc.)

Use deviceType as an early guardrail to avoid expensive protocol tests on incompatible hosts, where host.type is clearly not a possible target of this connector. This is usually the first criterion in a detection block.

For example, it is pointless to try using Windows-specific connectors on non-Windows systems, so you specify Windows for the deviceType property of the connector, as in the below example.

Syntax

connector:
  detection:
    criteria:
    - type: deviceType
      keep:
      - Windows

Properties

Runtime Behavior

Evaluation rule is:

1. Consider the host.type attribute of the host configured by the user in the MetricsHub configuration.
2. If host kind matches keep: success.
3. Else if host kind matches exclude: failure.
4. Else success only when keep is empty.

Recommended Pattern

• Put deviceType first in criteria lists.
• Use keep for strict targeting (Windows, Linux, Storage, Network, OOB).
• Use exclude only when you intentionally keep a broad target then filter out exceptions.

Common Mistakes

• Using exclude without keep and expecting strict allow-list behavior.
• Adding both keep and exclude for the same kind without realizing keep wins.
• Skipping deviceType and letting costly protocol criteria run first.

Examples

Community example (hardware/WinStorageSpaces/WinStorageSpaces.yaml), included directly from the connector source — note that this connector uses NT, the legacy host kind identifier for Windows:

# Must be Windows
- type: deviceType
  keep:
  - NT