Device Groups

In Formant, you can group devices together for easy access to viewing, sharing, or working with those devices.

What can you do with groups?

On the main page (https://app.formant.io), you will see a sidebar with all of your groups. This gives you a quick way to drill down on any particular group of devices. For example, common groupings are by robot type, location, job, or customer.

If you select one of the groups, you can see an info card of the devices in that group.

An example card for an online device is show here:

How groups are organized: Setting up tags

Groups are organized around tags. Each group maps directly to a single key-value tag instance. For example, you might want a group that maps to type: spot to view all of your Spot devices.

Tags must be set up so that they can be used to index groups. Go to "Settings" -> "Tags" and either add or select the tag that you want to key for a group. Let's say we want to group our devices by location.

View your location tag, and make sure that the toggle switch "This tag is used to create groups of devices" is set to "enabled."

Creating a group

Now that you have grouping enabled for the tags you want, time to create a group. In the same Settings panel, this time select "Groups."

In the top right, click "Add Group" and give it a name. Here, we are creating a group for our Spot devices.

The first toggle will make your group "Active" or "Inactive." An active group is one that can be found from the home page or from the side panel. Inactive groups won't provide any functionality until they're made active again.

Next, click the "TAG" tab on the top. Here you will select your key/value pair. Note: if your tag does not appear in the drop down, it must be enabled for group access (see previous step).

In the "CHOOSE DEVICES" tab, you can specify additional devices to be in this group. Note: when doing so, the tag that creates this group will be applied to any selected devices.

Now you're done!