Entity Explorer

The Entity Explorer provides high-level information about all monitored entities. Use the Entity Explorer to get an overview of the health of your deployment, manage entities, or access details about a specific entity. For more information about entities, including how to add, edit, or remove an entity, see Entities in SolarWinds Observability SaaS.

Open the Entity Explorer

To access the Entity Explorer, click Explore in the left pane.

Choose the view

You can display entity information as a grid or as a list. To change the view, click the Grid View button or List View button in the upper-right corner.

Grid View

In Grid View, a hexagon represents entities of a certain type. The color of the hexagon indicates whether the entity's health score is good, moderate, bad, or null, while the number inside the hexagon represents how many entities with this health score there are.

You can control which entities are displayed by selecting a status, type, time frame, and grouping from the drop-down menus. When viewing all entity types, the default grouping is by entity type, but the Group by drop-down can be used for other purposes. For example, you can see how many entities belong to each cloud provider (by selecting cloudProvider from the Group by drop-down) or when the entities were created.

To see more information about an entity:

• Hover over the hexagon to see the entity name and health score.
• Click the hexagon to display the entity's primary status widgets in the Inspector panel.
• Open the Entity Details view to see additional information.

List View

In List View, a table provides the following information about each entity:

• The entity type
• The name you gave the entity
• An icon and word to indicate whether the entity's health score is good, moderate, bad, or null
• The numeric health score

In List View, you can make the following changes:

• If you no longer want to observe an entity, you can remove it:

  • To remove one entity, hover over the table row to display a vertical ellipsis () in the last column. Click the vertical ellipsis, and then click Remove.

  • To remove multiple entities, select the checkbox to the left of each entity. Then click Delete.

    

• To change the configuration of an entity, hover over the table row to display a vertical ellipsis in the last column. Click the vertical ellipsis, click Edit, and then update the configuration.

To see more information about an entity:

• Click anywhere in a table row except the entity name to display the entity's primary status widgets in the Inspector panel.
• Open the Entity Details view to see additional information.

Click a column header in List View to sort the entities list by the selected column.

Locate specific entities

To locate specific entities, you can sort, apply filters, or search by name or tag.

Sort entities

Use the following options to change the display order:

• In Grid View, use the drop-down menu above the grid to sort entities by name or by health status.
• In List View, click any column heading to sort the list of entities by health score, entity type, or name.

Filter entities

You can apply filters in both List View and Grid View, but a specific entity type must be selected or a specific entity state.

1. Select the applicable entity state from the first drop-down menu.

   You can filter by all Active entities (entities in which an activity has recently been detected) or All.

2. If the Entity Explorer currently displays all entity types, select an entity type from the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner.

3. The Filters pane lists the filters available for the selected entity type.

4. Select one or more values for each filter you want to apply.

   

   The Entity Explorer lists only the entities that meet the filter criteria.

   The Search box displays the tag and value(s) that correspond to each filter you applied.

   

To remove individual filters, clear the values you want to remove. To remove all filters, click Clear All at the bottom of the Filters pane.

Search for entities

You can search for entities by name or tag in both List View and Grid View. To search by tag, a specific entity type must be selected.

Each filter option corresponds to a tag. However, some tags available in the Search box are not available in the Filters pane.

Search by name

1. Type part of the name in the Search box. The search is case-sensitive, so enter the string as the entity name is capitalized in the Entity Explorer.

2. Press Enter.

   The Entity Explorer lists only entities whose names include the search string.

   To further refine the list, you can add one or more tags to the search criteria.

   If you want to search by a virtual datastore name that includes a colon, enclose the name you type in the Search box in quotation marks, such as "lab-xyz-esxi-01:LocalStorage". Without quotation marks, the part before the colon would be interpreted as the key and the part after the colon as the value you are filtering by. The filter would thus find no matches.

Search by tag

1. If the Entity Explorer currently displays all entity types, select an entity type from the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner.

2. Click inside the Search box.

   A drop-down menu shows the tags available for the selected entity type.

3. Click the tag you want to filter by.

   The drop-down menu shows all values for the selected tag that are assigned to observed entities.

4. Click a value to select it.

   The Entity Explorer lists only entities with the specified tag value.

   The Search box displays your selections in the format tag:value, and the corresponding filters are selected in the Filters pane.

   To further refine the list, you can add other tags or search by name. If you include multiple criteria, entities must meet all criteria. The following example shows a search that includes two tags and part of an entity name.

   

Remove search criteria

To remove one or more search criteria, delete each item from the Search box and press Enter to rerun the search. To remove all search criteria, click the X in the Search box.

Search operators

The search query can be constructed using the following operators:

Operator	Search results
term1	containing term 1
term1 and term2	containing both term1 and term2
term1 or term2	one or more from either term1 or term2 (exclusively)
~term1	a partial match
!~term1	exclude a partial match (negation)
(term1, term2, term3) OR (term4, term5, term6)	one group of terms or other group of terms

Attributes in SolarWinds Observability SaaS are used in key:value fashion. An example search that constrains results to those from the ssh program containing “something bad” but not “noise”, or those with an error severity, is:

("something bad" program:ssh -noise) OR severity:error

It is possible to include more than one valid value for an attribute. Messages matching either one (OR) are returned:

program:(raid5toolsethtool)

Severity and facility attributes are those from the syslog specification. If severity is a part of the displayed log message, use a text search like error or INFO to find those messages.

Use attributes:

• To constrain matching to only a single field, either to eliminate false positives or search less data (and increase speed)

• To search facility or severity, which are not normally examined

Attributes and attribute-less constraints can be used together, and can be combined with negation.

All attributes except message can only have a single value per message, so AND is never relevant. Because of this, all attributes default to OR, as in the program: example above. Program:(a b) means program:(a OR b).

A search query wrapped in quotes searches for an exact match. No quotes in the search query results with terms that contain the query anywhere.

You can use the following operators when searching for attributes:

Operator:	Search results:
key IS EMPTY	all entities without an attribute
key IS NOT EMPTY	all entities with an attribute
key:value	attribute with an indicated value
key IN (a, b, c) / key:[1, 2, 3]	attribute's key that is one of the members of the group
key NOT in (a, b, c) / key:![1, 2, 3]	attribute's key that is not a member of the group

Other recommendations

If the searched item contains the colon symbol (:), make sure to wrap the searched term in double quotes ("). It is also recommended to preface the search with "(message:<searched_term>)".

Saved searches

If you regularly use the same combination of search criteria (applied filters, tags, or name), you can save the search to quickly run it again.

Save a search

1. Apply filters or enter search criteria to define the search you want to save.

2. Click the folder icon on the right side of the Search box, and click Save Search.

   The Create Saved Search dialog opens.

3. Enter a name to identify the search.

4. If you want the saved search to be available only to you, select Private.

5. Click Save.

Run a saved search

1. From the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner, select the entity type that you want to search.

2. Click the folder icon on the right side of the Search box.

   The drop-down menu lists the saved searches you have access to that are associated with the selected entity type.

3. Click the name of the search you want to run.

View entity details

Open the Entity Details view to see additional information about an entity:

• In Grid View, click an entity, and then click View Details in the Inspector Panel.
• In List View, click an entity's name. Or click a table row, and then click View Details in the Inspector Panel.

The details view shows the observed information about the selected entity and any related entities.

Monitor groups of entities

An entity group allows you to monitor a collection of entities simultaneously. For example, you can create an entity group to group all websites by customer or to group all services in a single environment.

Click Groups from the side navigation menu to see a list of your observed entity groups. Click an entity group to open the Overview for that Group. The Overview displays a list of entities within the group, and common widgets that display the overall health of the group and active alerts for group members. Click a member of the group to view additional details for the entity.

You can create an entity group using the Create Group button on the Groups area overview, or by selecting entities within the Entity Explorer. See Monitor groups of entities.