Advanced search techniques

09/09/2022 Contributors

Multiple search techniques can be used to search for data or objects in your monitored environment.

Wildcard search

You can perform multiple character wildcard search using the * character. For example, applic*n would return application.

Phrases used in search

A phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotation marks; for example, "PAW VNX LUN 5". You can use double quotes to search for documents that contain spaces in their names or attributes.

Boolean Operators

Using Boolean operators, you can combine multiple terms to form a more complex query.

OR
- The OR operator is the default conjunction operator.
  
  If there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used.
- The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exists in a document.
  
  For example, “storage OR netapp” searches for documents that contain either “storage” or “netapp”.
- High scores are given to documents that match most of the terms.
AND

You can use the AND operator to find documents in which both the search terms exist in a single document. For example, “aurora AND netapp” searches for documents that contain both “storage” and “netapp”.

You can use the symbol && instead of the word AND.
NOT

When you use the NOT operator, all the documents that contain the term after NOT are excluded from the search results. For example, “storage NOT netapp” searches for documents that contains only “storage” and not “netapp”.

You can use the symbol ! instead of the word NOT.

Prefix and suffix search

As soon as you start typing a search string, the search engine does a prefix and suffix search to find the best match.
Exact matches are given a higher score than a prefix or suffix match. The score is calculated based on the distance of the search term from the actual search result. For example, we have three storages: “aurora”, “aurora1”, and “aurora11”. Searching for “aur” will return all three storages. However, the search result for “aurora” will have the highest score because it has the closest distance to the prefix search string.
The search engine also searches for terms in reverse order, which allows you to perform a suffix search. For example, when you type “345” in the search box, the search engine searches for “345”.
Search is case-insensitive.

Search using indexed terms

Searches that match more of the indexed terms result in higher scores.

The search string is split into separate search terms by space. For example, the search string “storage aurora netapp” is split into three keywords: “storage”, “aurora”, and “netapp”. The search is performed using all three terms. The documents that match most of these terms will have the highest score. The more information you provide, the better are the search results. For example, you can search for a storage by its name and mode.

The UI displays the search results across categories, with the three top results per category. If you did not find a document that you were expecting, you can include more terms in the search string to improve the search results.

The following table provides a list of indexed terms that can be added to the search string.