Quick tip – using regular expressions in a dynamic group

Here is a quick tip on using a regular expression when creating a group.

 

OpsMgr dynamic inclusion rules are case sensitive.

If I have a group that I want to contain all computers that START with “OM”…. I can use the following expression:

 

 

The “^” tells regex to start a new line… without this – it will search the entire computername for “OM” instead of only servers with a name that starts with “OM”.  This shows the following group membership:

 

 

However – this is not all my “OM” servers.  This is because when some were built, they used a lower case name.  If I change the dynamic inclusion expression to “^om” I will only see the lower case servers (the NetBIOS Computer name is lower case… not the display name as shown):

 

 

Ok – how do I get them ALL in the same group?

 

There are a couple ways.

One way is to “OR” the two regex queries:

 

 

Bingo!

 

 

Another way – courtesy of Tim Helton – is to use the regex modifier (?i:) to make it case insensitive:

 

 

Which yields:

 

 

 

This should make dynamic groups a bit easier.  We can expand this to add the HealthService Watcher objects, which is typical for groups that we will scope notifications to:

 

 

Which yields all my Windows Computers, and their Health Service Watcher components.