Solution Documents

The idea of solution documents is to provide functions to document all kinds of things in the area of system management.

Probably, the most important, but not limited to, is the option to create documents describing problem resolution and to easily find the most appropriate solution document once you face the same class of problems. It is exactly this purpose giving the function its name. More generally you can provide solution documents for the following objects within Avantra: RealTime Monitoring, Daily Checks, Systems, Parameter Sets, Custom Checks, Maintenance Windows, Customers, and Changes.

A solution document can be written using the built-in editor WYSIWYG HTML-Editor. In addition, you can attach any existing document, or you can simply provide an external link to refer to any other document you may have in place already.

Every solution document may have the so-called references. These references may be used to link the solution documents to the objects mentioned above. However, the references do not imply direct links between solution documents and other objects, but they reflect a relationship between the two, and the number and types of references indicate how relevant a certain solution document is for a given object.

In other words, if you search for solution documents, you will find multiple results with the most relevant solution documents at the top of the results, as known from other search engines.

Solution documents are always assigned to a specific customer. This way, solution documents have access control since documents can only be viewed by users who have the necessary permissions for this customer. If you want to create a solution document that users of other customers can read, you should create a role for a generic customer and assign this role to the users who should be able to read the given document.

Managing Solutions

Creating Solution Documents

Perform the following steps to create Solution Documents.

Create a Solution Documents from scratch:

  1. Select Support  Solution Documents from the top-level menu. Click Create to create a new solution document.

  2. In the New Document dialog, you must set the name, the description, and the customer. The customer owns the Solution Documents and only users with the corresponding Solution Documents permissions on this customer can view or edit this document.

  3. Click Create to create the Solution Documents.

You can also create a Solution Documents which is tied to a specific object, for example, to a system, check, customer, daily check, monitoring parameter, and more. To do so, navigate to the object and perform the following steps:

  1. Select the object and select More  Create Document. You can also right-click the selected object to open the context menu and select Create Document in the context menu.

  2. The New Document dialog has already set a default name, which can be changed. Set the description and the customer.

  3. Click Create to create the Solution Documents.

Once the Solution Documents is created, a new window opens where you can start writing the document content in a WYSIWYG editor.

Besides writing the document, you can do the following:

  • Change document name, description, and customer.

  • Apply different fonts, colors, and many other commonly used and well-known text styles to your document.

  • Insert links to external resources.

  • Upload and manage attachments to this Solution Documents. Select Attachments to view, upload and delete attachments.

  • Select References to show/hide the Solution Documents references. Solution Documents references are very important for document search. Accurate document references will result in better search results.

  • If a Solution Documents is created from scratch, no references are created. If a Solution Documents is created for a specific object (see above), references to that object are automatically inserted to the Solution Documents.

Editing Solution Documents references:

  1. Select References to show/hide the Solution Documents references. Defined references are shown on the left side of the document window.

  2. Select Edit References… to open a dialog where references can be created, modified, or deleted.

  3. Click Add a Reference to create a new reference.

  4. In the drop-down box, select the reference type.

  5. Once a reference type is selected, a second drop-down box is presented with possible referenced values. There is a special reference type free text that allows you to use arbitrary kinds of tags for your documents.

  6. Repeat steps 3. to 5. to add additional references.

  7. Select the icon to remove a reference.

  8. Select Apply to save the references.

Finding Solution Documents

Finding Solution Documents is pretty easy. There are basically three ways:

  • Select Support  Solution Documents. A list with all visible Solution Documents is presented. Use the common UI filtering and sorting mechanisms to find documents.

  • Select Support  Solution Documents and click Search in the toolbar. A new dialog opens where you can enter a search term. Click on Search executes a full-text search and shows matching documents.

  • The last document search works differently. If you want to find Solution Documents that are related to a specific object (for example, system, check, customer, and so on), go to that object and select either More  Show documents or right-click that object and select Show Documents. The found documents have references to the selected object. Please note that not only the direct document references are used for the search, but also references of references are considered in the search. To show the relevance of a found document, stars are used to show the importance of a document. Five stars denote the highest relevance.

You need View Documents Permission to view Solution Documents. Editing a document requires the corresponding Edit Documents Permissions.