Explain about the collections for Faster search

Monitoring Indexing

Monitoring Indexing is a very critical as part of Preventive Monitoring in any Documentum Environment. A few tips in this regard are as follows.

1. Monitor how many items are there in the queue in failed or warning or acquired status. another type of status is “empty” or “blank” status. When it is acquired, means these items have already been acquired in the queue for indexing.

2. Undoubtedly, the failed items can be resubmitted for indexing.However, you need to monitor why the items wther fail or come up with a warning message. Are they the right format to be indexed? Are they password protected? Is there any timeout while indexing etc.

3. Keeping the indexing queue cleaned will help tracking what is going on in the indexing process. many times , you find that the object types other than document types are submitted for indexing. eg: dm_job. Ensure that your business requires these types to be submitted for indexing.Generally, these types do not need to be in the indexing queue.

4. As and when indexing takes place, the numbers in the FAST Admin UI should change. If they do not change, then there is every reason to suspect that something might be going wrong.

We ll discuss a few more in next topic.

5 Tips for Documentum FAST Environment

A few tips for Documentum FAST environment administration.

-1- Ensure not to run any 3 rd party tool like back up tools, Anti virus tools and Network monitoring tools in the indexing server environment.

-2- Keep on clearing the indexing queue. It will help when you have to troubleshoot any issue.

-3- Monitor the FAST GUI for matching engine status and indexing module status.

-4- Monitor All.log for troubleshooting information.

-5- Ensure that Indexing Agent and server running properly.

How does SCS service work?

All About Partitions

Partitions are the grouping of documents within a search column. Each Column is divided into 3 partitions a small partition,a medium partition and a large partition. Initially documents are placed in the small partition, then the index data is moved into medium and finally to the large partition. index data is unique in every partition.

What actualy reside in a partition:

Partition is indexing/idle/waiting:

Is the Size of the Partitions fixed?:

What is Online and Offline Partition?:

Coming up….

Maintaining Indexing Queue

House-keeping is an integral part of any system. The same applies in case of Indexing system in Documentum. indexing queue is the place where from you can get a view of  indexing items.

It would be wise if you involve the support team from EMC who can advise on maintaining the indexing system. however a few things can be kept in mind while maintaing the Indexing Queue.

-1- Ensure that indexing queue has only the recent items queued up and the very old ones not lined up making the queue long and difficult to administer.

-2- Ensure the types to be indexed. By default it will be dm_sysobject and subtyes. However, you can define the type basing upon your business requirements for indexing.

-3- Regularly, resubmit the failed items in the queue.

-4- Check for any dm_folder or dm_job types are submitted for indexing.

-5- Look at the warning messages for different types and that is going to help you troubleshoot

Coming up more on this…..

The Process of Indexing

The process of indexing is carried out by Indexing Agent and Indexing Server together. Below outlined are the steps.

1. Content and Metadata to be indexed are generated in a queue.
2. Index Agent reads the queue,exports the content files and metadata.
3. Index Agent converts the extracted content and metadata into DFTXML
4. Administrative Server such as Status server monitors the progress fo the indexing process from document acquisition to getting indexed

Making Result Available

The Steps for making result available to client are as follow.

1. Indexer will prepare the index for the document and metadata.
2. Indexes will be stored in their designated location
3. An user will hit the content server from any interface like webtop

Retrieving Indexing Status

Sometimes, you may come across a scenario where your document is not searchable and you want to check if the document is really indexed or not. Let’s try to understand, what really happens in those cases and how do we obtain a status of that.Some assumptions are,

Assumption I : Either a document is indexed or it is not

Assumption II :  If it is indexed, QR server should return the indexed attributes when queried via search module

Steps to Query if the Document is indexed:

Documentum Indexing Administration

Documentum Indexing Administration can be performed via the following.

1. Use of Documentum Administrator:

     – Analyse Index server Logs,
    – View Associated Queue items with the full text engine, 
    - Enable and Disable Index Agent/Index server
    – Stop and Start Indexing Agent/Index server
    -  Obtain the error and warning messsage for items
    – Remove items from queue by their status and resubmit items for indexing.
    – Check the Indexing Queue for Failed Items,for Items awaiting indexing,In progress and items that threw warning messages .