Many organizations where Notes and Domino have been deployed for a significant period of time find that they may have hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of Domino apps deployed throughout their environment. So it’s often really challenging to get a sense of how many applications you’ve got, who is using them, and how much. In fact, there may be literally thousands of applications in your Domino environment that haven’t been used by anyone for years.
Which is why we built Teamstudio Adviser. Adviser scans your Domino servers, building a database of application information, including true business usage, security and access info, as well as application complexity metrics. You can then explore your Domino application environment using an intuitive set of highly customizable reports.
A common problem that people find though, is that in large environments there’s just too much data to wade through. Adviser is built to collect and report on vast amounts of data, but you need to have a way to sift through it to find the information that’s relevant to you. Which is where Filters come in.
Filters allow you to specify which databases (and users, for the usage module) will be displayed in Adviser. It’s worth mentioning that Adviser always collects data for all apps and users; filters only affect the data that is displayed in the reports. Consequently, you can edit filters at any time to add and remove additional applications, and Adviser will be able to accurately display all data, including historical usage trends.
Filtering Databases
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 next to the module buttons. This will display the filter menu.
The filter menu will let you ignore this specific database on the current server, this database pathname on any server, all replicas of this database or all databases inheriting from the same template as this database, if appropriate. If you select a template, the filter menu will only offer the option of filtering all databases inheriting from the template: modules other than the catalog never display data for templates in any case.
When you filter a database, Adviser needs to recompute all of the usage counts for all users in the system. This may take some time to complete, so it runs as a background job. It may therefore take a little while before you see the results of the filter operation.
As an aside, because of the potentially large amount of data that Adviser needs to be able to process, many tasks are implemented as background jobs. You can track the progress of jobs from the Jobs UI, accessible from the bell icon in the status bar. When jobs are running, you will also see a progress bar under the status bar.
Clicking the bell icon again will dismiss the window. Showing or hiding the window does not affect the status of running jobs.
So, you could use filters to, for example, disable the display of all databases based off of the standard mail template. Or, you could disable the display of all deleted databases. Filtering deleted databases will remove them from usage counts and other modules, for a cleaner view of the applications that are still in active use.
Removing Filters
The databases list in the Catalog shows all databases but marks any that are filtered with a filter icon:
If you click on a filtered database, the details view will show the filters that apply to the database and allow you to remove them individually.
Alternatively, you can view a list of all filters in effect and remove any that are no longer required from the settings page, accessed from the gear icon in the status bar. Selecting the Filters category will display a list of all filters currently defined and allow you to delete them individually.
In brief, Filters are a great way to help you pare down huge amounts of data about your Domino application environment to a few very manageable screens.
If you have more questions about Filters in Adviser, or any aspect of using the product, click below to contact our friendly tech support team. We love to chat!