Many network and system management systems maintain and update models of the physical elements that they manage, and Operations Center uses this information to create and display element hierarchies.
However, some management systems cannot identify the discrete element origins of the events that they generate, nor have the capacity to sort the events into a relationship structure that users can easily understand.
In cases such as this, Operations Center uses HierarchyFiles to interpret and organize the events reported by management systems that cannot identify discreet element origins. Without a HierarchyFile, Operations Center would represents everything reported by these management systems as a single element.
For example, hierarchy file configurations are used with adapters to:
define a logical structure for grouping discovered objects found by using alarm fields
filter events by status or severity
define custom properties that are not included in the standard alarm and element property pages
The following sections describe how to use a hierarchy file to model objects and events: