As your device fleet grows, maintaining consistent configurations across new and existing devices becomes essential. Persistence ensures that predefined commands are automatically applied to devices as they join a group, keeping your fleet aligned without requiring manual intervention.
Persistent Groups
Creating a group of devices allows you to install and enable a set of software apps on all of the devices in the group. Applying persistence to a command will allow every new device that you add to the group later to automatically receive all of the desired apps installed immediately.
To illustrate persistence, we will do the following:
- Select a group of devices.
- Assign a command to the group.
- Define the command as persistent.
- Add a device to the group and see how the new device will also receive the persistent command.
Step One: Select a Group
To select a group:
1. In the Radix Device Management Platform Dashboard, click on the Devices icon in the sidebar menu, to open the Devices Table.
2. Click on the Groups button to open the Groups pane (if it is not open already).
The Groups pane opens.
3. In the Search bar, search for the group you want (we will type “aep”, to find the group aep)
We see that it presently consists of three Android devices.
4. We need to know the identifying tag for the devices in this group. Click on the three-dot menu next to the group name and click Edit Group.
5. In the Edit Group window, click on Tags in the sidebar menu.
We see that “aep” is the identifying tag for group “aep”. Any device with the tag “aep” will be a member of this group.
Step Two: Assign a command to the Group
We will now assign a command to the group.
To assign a command to the group:
1. Click on the three-dot menu next to the group name, to open the Group Actions drop-down menu.
2. Choose the command you want to apply (we will select the Deploy>Messaging command).
3. Select the command you want to apply (we will select one of the stored messages to be displayed on devices in the group “aep”) and click Apply to send it to the devices.
That will send this message to the devices currently in the group.
Step Three: Make the Command Persistent
Now we will apply persistence to the command. With persistence, as soon as a device is added to the group, it will receive the persistent command.
To make the command persistent:
1. In the Radix Device Management platform, go to the Command History log and find the command that you want to make persistent. Note that the icon for the command is blue, meaning that it is assigned to a group, but not a persistent command.
2. Click on the three-dots menu near the command and select Persist.
3. In the prompt, click Yes to agree to make the command persistent:
The icon for the command will now turn green:
Step Four: Assign a New Device to the Group
Now we will assign a new device to our group, by assigning the group’s identifying tag to that device. (In our example, the group’s identifying tag is “aep”)
To assign a device to a group:
1. In the Radix Device Dashboard, go to the Devices Table and select the device that you want to be in the group:
2. Click on the three-dots menu “Device Actions” on the right and go to Device>Set Device Tags:
3. Add the identifying tag for our group. (In our case, the tag is “aep”.)
4. As soon as we click Confirm, the device will receive the “send message” command that we have associated with the group:
Advanced Message that we sent to group "aep"
Removing Persistence
If you no longer want a command or software installation to remain persistent, you can disable persistence at any time. To remove persistence:
1. Open the Command History log by clicking on the Commands History icon in the Overview Dashboard.
2. Find the command to which you would like to remove the persistence feature. (In our case, it is the command “Advanced Messaging: that’s all folks”).
3. Click on the command’s three-dots menu and click on Stop Persistence.
4. You will be prompted if you wish to stop persistence. Click Yes.
The color of the command’s icon in the Commands History log will now revert from green to blue. This indicates that the group command no longer has persistence.
The shield icon reverts back to blue when the command is no longer persistent
For more information, consult Applying Persistence to a Command on the Radix website's Support page.