As an NNT Change Tracker user, it’s likely you spend a reasonable amount of time in the Events Tile of Change Tracker and have often used the Filter option to find events of interest.
Therefore, you will have undoubtedly seen one of the search options available to you in a field marked ‘Text search:’ This little guy shown below:
Now it is blatantly obvious what this field is all about, but there is a little more to it than initially meets the eye J. ‘Hidden level alert!!’
The text search field is a window into the Mongo search function. For those of you who do not know, Change Tracker uses Mongo as its datastore. Mongo has a number of functions when it comes to searching, but Change Tracker uses the text search function for efficiency and speed, as a text search is restricted to the index data within Change Tracker. Mongo’s description of the text search option can be found here:
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/query/text/index.html#search-field
That’s the official reference, now let’s look at some examples to see what is possible with Change Tracker.
Match Any Number of Words
I can obviously search for a single word simply by adding the desired word to the field. However, I can also look for any matches to a list of words. For example, if I search for “new file” I get results for any event line that includes the words ‘new’ or ’file’.
Search for a Phrase
If you are looking for an exact match to a phrase, rather than the implied ‘or’ statement of the search above, then surround the desired match with the \ symbol. If I’m interested in finding any entries for the Microsoft visual packages then the search text should look like \microsoft visual\.
Use Exclusions
I can take our searching a step further with exclusions. I might be interested in file activity but want to exclude a certain type of file change detection. For example, I might want to concentrate on all file integrity changes but I’m only interested in newly created file and not files that have been deleted or changed. In this case, I can use the search text term ‘file -change -deleted’. This search term will include all events which contain the word ‘file’ but exclude any entries which also include ‘change’ or ‘deleted’.
Hopefully, this article will help you search like a pro, but if you have any further question please contact [email protected].
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