When working in the Service Manager console, you can use the different views to browse existing incidents. But if you're searching for very specific incidents and don't have a view with that given criteria, it can be very hard to locate those tickets. Besides, you're only looking for that right now and do not want to create a view to find them. This is when the search function in SCSM comes very handy.
The search bar is located in the top-right corner of the console and if you enter some text here and press Enter, the system will actually search the display name of all work items. As the display name is a combination of the ID and title of the work item, this means that if you're looking for something with a specific title or ID, it's very easy to find - just enter the information in the search bar and press Enter.
But let's say that you're looking for incidents where the affected user is working on a particular department and where the description field contains a certain keyword - that's when you have to use the advanced search function.
In this recipe, we will search for incidents where the affected user is working in the marketing department and where the Description field contains the word Intranet.
- Start the Service Manager console and press the little arrow next to the search bar in the top-right corner of the console.
- Click Advanced Search to initiate a new search.
- To specify a class to search for, click the Browse button.
- When the Select a Class dialog is launched, click the drop-down menu in the top-right corner that reads Frequently used basic classes and change it to Combination classes.
- We need to do this since we are going to traverse the affected user relationship to find incidents with affected users that are working in the marketing department.
- In the filter field, enter Incident. Then locate and select the combination class named Incident (typical) and click OK.
- Locate and select the Description property. Click Add to add it as a search criteria and enter
intranetas the search string. - Now click the little arrow next to Incident to list all relationships in this particular combination class. Select Affected User and locate and add the Department property as another search criterion.
- Change contains to equals, and then enter Marketing as the search string. This ensures that we get an exact match of the string:
- Click Search to find all incidents matching these criteria.
Using the advanced search function you can do very advanced searches to locate any type of objects. The function is very useful to find those very specific work items or to do some quick analytics. One thing to keep in mind though, is that the search function does only search for active data in SCSM. Hence, objects that has been groomed and only exist in the SCSM Data Warehouse cannot be found using the search functions!
Using the different combination classes, you can basically search for anything. A common request is to be able to search the action log for certain keywords - this can be achieved using by using this function. If you would like to search for all incidents which have an action log comment from the analyst that contains the word test can be achieved, such as in the following screenshot:
- For more information on how to retrieve data from the Data Warehouse, including data that has been groomed, please see Chapter 10, Working with the Data Warehouse and Reporting
- For more information regarding grooming, please take a look at the following blog posts on the official SCSM blog: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/servicemanager/2009/09/18/data-retention-policies-aka-grooming-in-the-service-manager-database/
- https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/servicemanager/2015/11/16/an-in-depth-look-at-grooming-in-system-center-service-manager-part-1/