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Utility Hosts

Purpose

Utility Hosts lists the devices that talk to everything and belong to nothing. Monitoring servers, backup targets, domain controllers and patch servers connect to most of the estate, so treating their traffic as application evidence would merge unrelated applications into one. A monitoring server's connections to the hosts it monitors are not evidence that those hosts form an application, but they look the same in a flow table. The on-screen subtitle reads: "Devices flagged as shared infrastructure (load balancers, jump hosts, domain controllers) so candidate grouping doesn't bridge unrelated applications together through them."

Where to find it

Discover → Application Inference → Utility Hosts. The page header is Utility Hosts.

What you see

Columns

  • Device Name
  • Match Pattern
  • Reason
  • Is Seeded
  • Is Active

Actions

The grid uses the standard toolbar: Create New, Edit, Remove selected, Clear selection, Reload table data, Enable spreadsheet editing, Export CSV and Import CSV.

Each row has a View Details action (the eye icon).

Form

Create New opens the Create new entry form. Edit opens the Edit entry form for the selected row, with the same fields filled in. The fields, in order:

  • Device Name
  • Match Pattern
  • Reason: text.
  • Is Seeded
  • Is Active: a checkbox.

The footer has Cancel and Save.

Filters

Each column has a filter row, and the grid has a Search: box and a page-size selector (10, 25, 50 or All entries per page).

The grid remembers its Search: text, column filters, sort order and page size between visits. If the grid shows fewer rows than you expect, clear the Search: box and the filter row.

How to

Flag a device as a utility host

  1. List the shared infrastructure: anything that legitimately connects to most of the estate.
  2. Go to Discover → Application Inference → Utility Hosts.
  3. Select Create New. The Create new entry form opens.
  4. Enter the Device Name and a Reason, so the next consultant knows why the device is flagged.
  5. Select Is Active, then select Save, or Cancel to close the form without saving.
  6. Run grouping again on Candidate Applications, and check whether applications that were merged now separate.

Saving a row does not start a run. The change applies the next time grouping runs.

Run inference on Candidate Applications names any hosts it excluded "for talking to too much of the estate". That exclusion is automatic and covers only the device and app-to-app stages. Those hosts are good candidates to check for this list.

A busy application server is not a utility host. Flag a device only if its connections are a service it provides to the estate as infrastructure, not dependencies within one application.