HCL Domino, the product formerly known as Lotus Notes, has been around for a long time - more than 30 years in fact. Many organizations that have had a Lotus Notes environment for a good chunk of that time have built hundreds, thousands, or in some cases tens of thousands of customized business applications based on the Notes/Domino platform. And many of those organizations are using Teamstudio Adviser to help them navigate through their application landscape and get their arms around how many applications they have, the extent to which they are being used, and by whom. Adviser scans all the databases in your Domino environment, catalogs the applications, monitors their usage over time, and assesses their design complexity. Then it puts all that data together into a number of charts and dashboards that make it easy to navigate.
Despite Adviser’s friendly, web based user interface, if you really do have thousands and thousands of databases in your Domino environment, the amount of data being presented to you can become overwhelming. Which is why Adviser allows you to set up filters to make sure that you only see the information that you’re interested in at any one time. One thing to make clear, is that Adviser always collects and stores data on all the databases in the servers you point it at. The filters only apply to what Adviser shows you. So if you are collecting usage stats over a period of several months, you can adjust the filters at any time and still see data that has been collected in the past.
Filters can be applied to both databases and, in the case of the Usage module, users. You can create a filter to exclude a database from the database details view in any module. With the required database selected, click the 'no entry' button that is located next to the module buttons. This will display the filter menu.
When filtering out an individual database like this, you have the option of filtering out just this specific instance of the database on this server, you can filter out this database (by pathname) on any server, you can filter out all replicas of this database, or you can filter out any databases that inherit their design from the same template as the selected database. Keep in mind that removing data for one or more databases by filtering in the Usage module will require all usage totals to be recomputed, which could take a while to complete, depending on how many databases you have.
You can see databases that have been filtered out by going to the Catalog module. Filtered databases will be shown with a filter icon against them:
Clicking on a filtered database in the Catalog module shows you the filters that apply to that database and allows you to remove them if you so wish.
If you lose track of which databases you have filtered, and just want to see a list of all filters in one place, you can go to the settings page (accessed from the gear icon in the status bar). Click on the Filters category, and you will see a list of all filters that are currently active. You can also delete filters individually from this page if you want.
And that’s it. Filters in Adviser allow you to focus in on just the data you want from information on potentially thousands of databases or users. To learn more about Teamstudio Adviser, or if you have questions about filters or any other aspect of the product, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!