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Organizing devices: cohorts vs. attributes

Before you deploy an update, you need a way to say which devices should receive it. In Lesson 2, you learned about the organization and project; here we zoom into how devices are organized within a project.

Cohorts: groups for OTA targeting

A cohort is a mutually exclusive grouping of devices built for update deployment control. Typical cohorts are alpha, beta, and production, but a cohort can represent any grouping you deploy to as a unit, such as a deployment facility (for example, site_a). The defining rule is that a device belongs to exactly one cohort at a time, though you can reassign it whenever you like.

This rule makes OTA targeting clear and unambiguous. You activate a release for a cohort, and every device in it (or a staged subset) becomes eligible. Cohorts can also be used when filtering dashboards, metric charts, alerts, and issues, but you may want to filter by other device metadata that is not mutually exclusive.

Attributes

An attribute is a type of metric that stores the latest value reported. For example, battery_level or chassis_temperature_celsius are usually categorized as attributes because you typically only need to know the last known value. Attributes can also be data that is completely static, such as manufacturing_date. Attributes are more broadly considered metadata about a device, and are not used for OTA targeting like cohorts. A device has many attributes at once, and their values change over time as the device reports new data.

You can use attributes to search and filter your fleet and to build device sets, which are saved searches whose membership is defined by a query. Because a device set is just every device matching a query right now, a device can belong to many device sets at once, and membership shifts as attribute values change.

Cohorts vs. attributes

 CohortAttribute / device set
PurposeOTA targeting and deployment controlDescribing and searching devices by their state
MembershipExactly one cohort per deviceA device has many attributes and can match many device sets
ChangesOnly when you reassign the deviceContinuously, as the device reports new values
Used forActivating releases, staged rolloutsFiltering dashboards, searches, device sets

Important

You can move devices between cohorts individually or with the Bulk Action → Change Cohort feature on the Devices page.

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