Groups & Tags

Once you are past a dozen monitors, finding the right one matters. Pingniner gives you four ways to organise them.

Groups

A group is a single label a monitor belongs to. Manage them under Account → Groups; a group has only a name.

Assign a group when creating or editing any monitor, under Advanced. Groups then appear as a filter and a column on every monitor list.

A monitor belongs to one group at most, and groups do not nest.

What to group by

Pick one axis and stay consistent. Common choices:

• Client — for agencies and MSPs, so you can filter to one customer instantly
• Environment — production, staging, development
• Application — everything belonging to one system, across monitor types
• Location — office, data centre, region

TIP

Group by whatever you would want to see filtered during an incident. If your first question is always "is this affecting a client?", group by client.

Groups are optional but recommended. Adding them later means editing every monitor individually, so it is worth deciding early.

Tags

Tags are free-form labels, and a monitor can have as many as you like. Set them under Advanced on any monitor.

Tags appear as badges on monitor lists and are searchable and filterable.

Because groups are single-value and tags are not, they answer different questions:

	Groups	Tags
Per monitor	One	Many
Managed centrally	Yes	No — typed freely
Best for	The one big division	Cross-cutting attributes

A monitor might be in the group "Acme Corp" and tagged production, customer-facing and pci.

WARNING

Tags are typed by hand, so production, Production and prod are three different tags. Agree a convention before you have five hundred monitors.

Notes

Every monitor has a rich-text Notes field under Advanced. This is where context lives — the sort of thing you would otherwise have to ask a colleague.

Good things to put in notes:

• Who owns this service and how to reach them
• What to check first when it alerts
• Why a threshold is set unusually high or low
• Links to runbooks, dashboards or the relevant repository

TIP

The best time to write a note is right after an incident, while you still remember what you had to figure out. The next person to get paged at 3am will be grateful — and it will probably be you.

Comments

Monitors and status pages support comments, via the Comments action.

Notes are reference material; comments are a conversation. Use them to record what happened during an incident, hand work between colleagues, or explain a change.

Finding things quickly

• Filters on every list — by group, status and tag. Your filters and search persist between visits.
• Global search — the spotlight search jumps to any monitor by name from anywhere.
• Status filter — narrow to Down or Degraded when something is happening.

Best Practices

• Decide your grouping before you have many monitors. Retrofitting is tedious.
• Use groups for the division you filter by most, tags for everything else.
• Keep tag vocabulary small. A tag used once is a tag nobody will think to filter by.
• Write notes on anything non-obvious. Especially unusual thresholds — the next person to see one will otherwise assume it is a mistake and "fix" it.