Knowledge Manager Manual

 


Manage your search knowledge

Define navigation to saved searches and reports

Define navigation to saved searches and reports

As a knowledge manager you should ensure that your saved searches and reports appear in the top-level navigation menus of your Splunk apps in a logical manner that facilitates ease of discovery. To do this you need to customize the navigation menus for your apps. If you fail to attend to your navigation menus, over time they may become overlong and inefficient, as saved searches and reports are added without subsequent categorization.

To manage the way your searches are saved and organized in the top-level navigation menu for an app, you need to work with the code behind the nav menu. When you do this, keep in mind that the nav code refers to lists of searches and reports as collections.

The following subtopics describe various things you can do to organize your saved search and reports listings in the top-level navigation menu. For details on how to adjust the XML code for the navigation menu, see "Build navigation for your app" in the Developer manual.

Set up a default collection

Each app should have a default collection set up for "unclassified" searches. Unclassified searches are any searches that haven't been explicitly identified in the nav menu code. This is the collection in which all newly saved searches appear. In the Search app, for example, the default collection is Searches & Reports.

If you do not set up a default collection, you will have to manually add saved searches to the nav code to see them in your app's top-level navigation menu.

Note: A default collection should also be set up for unclassified views and dashboards.

Organize saved searches in nested collections

As the number of saved searches and reports that are created for an app grows, you're going to want to find ways to organize those searches in a logical manner. You can manually construct collections that group lists together by function. Going further, you can set up nested collections that subdivide large collections into groups of smaller ones.

In the Search app, nested collections are used to group similar types of searches together:

Navigation nestedcollections.png

Dynamically group together saved searches

Collections can be set up to dynamically group together saved searches that have matching substrings in their names. For example, in the Search app example above, a nested collection groups together all uncategorized searches with the string "admin" in their titles.

There are two ways that saved searches can be dynamically grouped together with matching substrings:

Note: In both cases, only saved searches and reports that are available to the app with which the navigation menu is associated are displayed.

This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk: 4.1 , 4.1.1 , 4.1.2 , 4.1.3 , 4.1.4 , 4.1.5 , 4.1.6 , 4.1.7 , 4.1.8 , 4.2 , 4.2.1 , 4.2.2 , 4.2.3 , 4.2.4 , 4.2.5 , 4.3 , 4.3.1 , 4.3.2 View the Article History for its revisions.


Comments

This really look exactly what I need to do. But how do I do it? Especially if I don't have my own APP, I am not developing my own app. I just need to customize the search app better.

Lootsd
August 18, 2010

Per Robp, this document states that this can be done but doesn't direct the reader to the instructions and examples on how to do it. It would be a good idea to provide a link to that section of the doc.
-wolverine

Tphi
August 13, 2010

found how to manually construct navigation here:

http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/4.1.3/Developer/Step6BuildNavigation

Robp
July 7, 2010

How does one "manually construct collections that group lists together by function" as listed above?

Robp
July 7, 2010

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