It does not appear that there's any way to do host templating. We have 1000s of servers, many of which are based off of server profiles (e.g., Linux web server) with standardized configs. If we wanted to add a new monitor to 120 servers of a certain class, how could we accomplish that?
This is EXACTLY what the Deployment Server is built for. So, to do mass configuration, you can use any mass config tool you typically would use (say puppet or chef or Altiris or ...) but if you do, you'll need to restart the UniversalForwarder to get it to reread the configs and start pushing. However, if you use DeploymentServer, that happens for free. Just modify the templates and magically new data flows in.
This is EXACTLY what the Deployment Server is built for. So, to do mass configuration, you can use any mass config tool you typically would use (say puppet or chef or Altiris or ...) but if you do, you'll need to restart the UniversalForwarder to get it to reread the configs and start pushing. However, if you use DeploymentServer, that happens for free. Just modify the templates and magically new data flows in.
I would also add that :