The notes feature allows items and sets of items to be annotated with information relating to the reason for their current state. Typically this information is a short summary describing the findings of an investigative process carried out by the user.

Notes can be created and then associated with a set of items to group together changes believed to be due to a single root cause, for example a specific planned change. A note maintains a log of comments describing activities, and can contain customizable structured data to aid reporting and gathering of metrics around infrastructure change.

Items may be changed by a user or by the reasoning engine. A record of all changes is stored with the item. The record of these changes contains:

• The username of the user making the change. If Foundation has made the change (for example, as a result of updates due to new discovery scans) the user will be Reasoning
• A timestamp of when the action took place
• Some text describing the action. If the action was invoked by a user then any text entered by the user is included

User Invoked Actions Kept in the History

The following user invoked actions are kept as part of the item history:

• Clear alert
• Raise alert
• Set as Expected
• Set as Prohibited
• Set as Unknown
• Re-include item in view
• Exclude item from view
• Take ownership
• Remove ownership

Any text added by the user when taking the action will be included in the text attribute.

Reasoning Engine Invoked Actions Kept in the History

The following reasoning engine invoked actions are kept as part of the item history:

• Any LMItem node that begins to age
• Any LMItem node that stops aging, or
• Any LMItem node whose lifecycle changes to some non-current state, or
• Any LMItem node whose LMitemComponent relationship has become unlinked

One history note entry is generated automatically for each of these events.
The user for these entries shall be Reasoning, the description is automatically generated and will contain information about what has affected the item.

The Item Journal

This feature allows the user to view the Item History, notes for an item and notes from a list of items in the Show View page. Clicking the note icon on an item displays the item journal. This journal consists of four panels.They are:

• Summary
• Item History
• Notes Linked To Item
• Notes Not Linked To Item

To display the Notes Journal

Click on the Notes icon next to the Item entry.

When the Journal is opened the Summary panel is visible. All panels show paginated views of their contents. The page controls can be found below the content.

The Summary Panel

The Summary panel shows all note entries, and item history associated with the item. The entries are ordered by their date; the most recent at the top. The note entries can be expanded to show all of the entry. A collapsed entry shows only the time of the entry and its first few words. Item history entries are indicated by "History Event".

Item History

This panel shows all item history note entries. The contents are ordered by their date; the most recent at the top. Note entries can be expanded or collapsed to show the entry or just the header respectively.

Notes Linked To Item

This panel shows all notes associated with the item. As for note entries a note can be expanded or collapsed to show more or less detail. Two links are display by each note; show note and remove. Show note will display the note and remove will remove the note's association with the item.

This panel also allows the filtering of notes by keyword. For further information about this please refer to Filtering Notes by Keyword.

Notes Not Linked To Item

This panel shows all notes not associated with the item. As for note entries a note can be expanded or collapsed to show more or less detail. Two links are display by each note; show note and add. Show note will display the note and add will associate the note with the item.

Filtering Notes by Keyword

Notes can be filtered on keywords and whether they are:

• open
• closed
• open or closed

This filtering is available in the following locations:

• Notes Linked To Item panel in the journal
• Notes Not Linked To Item panel in the journal
• Manage Motes page

The notes returned are ones whose attribute values contain the keyword, or notes that are associated with note entries that contain the keyword.

Creating a Note

Notes can be created by selecting a number of items from within a view and using the Link to new note mass action:

1. Log in to the Foundation UI as a user that is a member of the lifecycle-management-administrator group.
2. Click the Change tab at the top-right of the display. If it is already selected, you can click Manage Views in the navigation bar below the large tabs instead.
3. Open a view which contains the items you want to be associated with the note.
4. Adjust the filtering, sort and paging options on the view so that all items are shown on a single page. If this is not possible, you can create the note linked to some of these items and link the rest later.

See the next section for more information.

1. Select the items to be linked to the new note using the check boxes on the left-hand-side of the display.
2. Select Link to new note from the mass actions dropdown.
3. Specify a title for the note and the contents of the notes first entry.

This first entry also forms the notes preview section. This section is displayed on the Manage Notes page and in the journal for related notes and other notes.

After the note has been created, all the selected items will be linked to that new note.

Linking and Unlinking Items and Notes in the Item View

A note is associated with an item in order to indicate that the item is relevant to the note's content.
For example, a new instance of a BAI might appear on several hosts. This would cause several new items to show up in the view, flagged as alerted and with RAG status at amber. If a note was created to track the progress of the issue then all the new items will be associated with the created note.

How you would associate/disassociate a note with items

There are two ways of associating/disassociating a note with an item:

For a single item

1. Open the journal of the item you want to associate.
2. Click the Notes Not Linked To Item pane of the journal - this shows all the notes that the current item is not yet associated with. You can search the notes by keywords using the keywords box.
3. Click on the note you want to associate.
4. The note will disappear from the Notes Not Linked To Item pane and will be placed in the Notes Linked To Item pane. It is now associated with the item.
5. Disassociating a note and an item works similarly - go to the Notes Linked To Item pane and click the item you no longer want associated.

For multiple items

1. Select the items you want to associate with a note using the checkbox on the left of the window.
2. Select Link to existing note from the mass action dropdown. All the open notes on the system are displayed.
3. Select the note you want to associate with the checked items. You can search the notes by keywords using the keywords box.
4. Disassociating items works similarly - select the Unlink from note action instead. The disassociate box lists all notes that are associated with at least one of the selected items.

Deleting a Note

A note can be deleted using the Delete link next to a note on the Manage Notes page. Deleting a note removes all of its associated entries. Any user in the lifecycle-management-user or lifecycle-management-administrator groups can delete a note.

Managing Notes

This section describes how to browse and access existing Lifecycle Management notes.

• The Manage Notes page
• Displaying note details
• Browsing to a related view from the show note page

The Manage Notes Page

The Manage Notes page provides a means of locating notes currently set up on the appliance, regardless of whether or not they are associated with any items.
To display a list of views:

1. Log in to the Foundation UI, if you are not already, as a user that is a member of either the lifecycle-management-user or lifecycle-management-administrator groups.
2. Click the Change tab at the top-right of the display, if it is not already selected.
3. Click Manage Notes in the navigation bar below the large tabs.
   The page displayed is as shown below.
   
   

Each entry on the display corresponds to an individual note. The Manage Notes page is paginated and shows only a fixed number of notes per page.

You can change this and the page number currently being displayed using the controls at the bottom of the display.

The table below summarizes the details that may be displayed in the entry for each view.

Displaying the Note Details in the Show Note Page

To display a details of a note click on the note entry in the Manage Notes page. The Entries page is displayed.

The page is divided into three sections:

• Note Details
• Note Entries
• Add a new entry

Note Details

The structured data for the note is displayed at the top of this page under the title of "Note Details". Structured data is made up of a label and a value. It allows the user to easily associate a note with an issue that occurs regularly or apply some other information that may be applied to multiple notes.

Adding a New Structured Field

To add a new field, first click on the Add a new field link. Enter text for the 'Label' and 'Value' sections and then either press the return key or click on the add icon. Clicking on the reset icon will remove any existing text from both the label and value fields and insert the default values.

Editing an Existing Structured Field

An existing field can be edited by double clicking on it. This will result in both the label and value of the field becoming inputs and then they can both be modified.

When the field editing has been completed, click on the save (tick) icon to save any changes. Alternatively, the editing action can be cancelled by clicking on the cancel icon. Finally the field can be deleted entirely by clicking on the delete icon.
If you double click on one field while another is already being edited, then the existing field will be saved prior to the other field being opened for edit.

Note: When a structured field is added or modified, a new note entry is automatically created to capture what the user has changed.

Auto complete entry

On the Note Details Page, the structured fields have an auto completer that allows you to type a couple of characters and see all the field labels/values that are already exist in other Notes and match the users first few characters.

The matches are type sensitive so when you type characters into the label input of a structured field, then only other labels that match the input will be returned. The same applies for structured fields value, only other field values that match the input will be returned.

You can press the Esc key to remove the suggested matches and can also continue typing to further refine the search.

Note Entries

A note contains one or more note entries. The entry represents a step in the lifecycle of the note.

For example, in order to ascertain why an item has started aging, a note is created and an initial entry can be added. This indicates what the user intends to do (i.e. an action plan). Each subsequent entry can then represent a step in that action plan.
The note entries will by default appear in an oldest first state. This is to enable whoever is looking at the note to start at the beginning and work through the steps that have been taken. The flip order link refreshes the view and displays the note entries in a newest first fashion.

Note: Note entries cannot be modified in this version of Lifecycle Management.

Add a new entry

Below the note entries section, the user can add a new note entry for that note.

Adding a New Entry

A new note entry can be added by typing into the text area provided at the bottom of the show note page. This text area can be expanded if required.

Clicking the "Add Entry" button will refresh the entries section of the page. Depending upon which chronological order the note entries are being displayed in, the new entry will either appear as the first entry on the page or the last entry (on the last page if there are multiple pages).

The "Clear Form" button clears the text that has been entered into the text area.

Related Views in the Show Note Page

The Entries page allows the user to navigate to a view containing items linked to that note.
The Related Views tab shows the current structured fields associated with the note including it's current status, i.e. whether it is open or closed. The new fields can be added or any of the existing fields can be modified in the same way that they can from Entries tab.

No pagination is available on this page so when the number of views associated with the note gets too large, a scroll pane appears.

The following information is displayed for each of the linked views:

• The number of items within each view that are linked to this note.
• The total number of items in the view.
• The number of items that are currently alerted.
• When the view was last modified (either an attribute such as the name/scope rule was updated or an item within the view was updated).
• The view type.

The idea behind the Related Views tab is that a user can discover how much impact an issue is having across the infrastructure monitored/mapped by Lifecycle Management.

The user logs into Foundation and navigates to the Manage Notes page because they know that is where all the notes are displayed.
The user enters some keywords associated with the issue they are tracking.

They then select the relevant note from the returned list of notes. This takes them to the Entries page.

The user can click on the Related Views tab to display the views that contain items associated with this note. Each of the views could be a different view of the infrastructure being monitored by Foundation. The user will be able to select the desired view and will then be taken to the Show View page with only the items associated with that note being displayed.

This will allow the user to see what applications are currently being affected by the issue associated with the note. The user could then perform an action such as setting the items ownership or unlinking some of the items from the note.