Documentation forSolarWinds Service Desk

Advanced search and syntax rules

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Introduction

SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) does not use a specific language for searches. It provides a search bar that allows you to search the platform based on free text or by property, for example:

  • Incidents
  • Service Catalog Items
  • Problems, Changes
  • Release
  • Solutions
  • Other objects

By default, the search function matches the whole term entered. If needed, wildcard searches can be used as follows:

  • ? replaces a single character
  • * replaces zero or more characters

Exact phrase matching

Use Exact Phrase Matching when you want SWSD to return only exact matches to your search input. For example, for example:

  • quick brown fox
  • AB-DFG250-MALTA

The search query displays only results that contain all the search terms, exactly as written in the search bar.

Properties searches

When searching for a specific term you can search by the following properties.

  • name. You can enter a specific Incident Name, or perhaps the word keyboard.
  • number. You can enter a specific Incident Number or any other Object number.
  • tag. You can search through an object’s tags, for example, Los Angeles.

Properties are searched using the property name and value. If you are searching for incidents with the tag Los Angeles, write:

tag: "Los Angeles"

In addition, the following properties can be used:

  • description
  • department
  • user
  • type
  • category
  • status
  • variables
  • manufacturer
  • networks (to search for one of the following networks-related fields, use this example: networks:192.168.103.126) 

    • ip_address

    • mac_address

    • dhcp

    • gateway

  • serial
The properties MUST be entered in lower case.

Boolean operators

The preferred operators are + and -.

  • Adding a plus sign [+] to a search means the words will be included as part of the search.
  • Adding a minus sign [-] to a search means the words will be excluded from the search.

A search containing quick brown +fox -news would return matches where:

  • Fox is present.
  • News is not present.
  • Quick and brown are optional (but their presence increases the relevance).

Grouping

Multiple terms or clauses can be grouped together with parentheses to form sub-queries.

The following is an example of how to use and/or combination to search for incidents under the UK site where the description is either UAT or Workaround.

(description: UAT OR description: Workaround) AND site: UK

AND and OR conditions must be written in capital letters.

Number ranges

Inclusive ranges are specified with square brackets [min TO max] and exclusive ranges with curly brackets {min TO max}.

For example, to search for all incident numbers between 4000 and 4400 write:

number:[4000 TO 4400]

Reserved characters

Reserved characters are: + - = & || > < ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /

If you need to use any of the characters which function as operators in your query itself but not as operators, preface them with a leading backslash.

For example, to search for (1+1)=2, write:

\(1\+1\)\=2