Set attributes on hosts
To further define a report's scope and search criteria, you can define custom attributes with discrete values. Attributes are characteristics of your hosts. You can add any number of attributes, and they can represent any characteristic. These attributes provide an additional method for including and excluding data in a report.
Attributes provide a way of defining a set of objects that share a certain characteristic. Attributes represent logical relationships between objects and their relevant characteristics. Typically, you'll set up attributes to aid in defining the scope of a report. For example, you might set up a "maintenance contract" attribute that you can associate with the hosts for which you have service coverage. Or, you might create an attribute to organize hosts by geographical location so that the administrators responsible for the hosts at each corporate location can generate reports for their specific sites.
You can select hosts in bulk and assign or modify attributes associated with them. Use Search and Advanced Filters to create a results set with the hosts you'd like to modify. For example, you can create a search query to find all Windows 2008 R2 systems as reported by NetBackup. When the search results are displayed, you can quickly apply a custom attribute such as patch applied.