It can be difficult to keep an overview over the whole IT infrastructure of an enterprise. With the help of Metadata for Confluence you can document the infrastructure within Confluence. This way, getting a structured summary is just some clicks away.
Design
Consider a set-up with several servers in different locations and with different properties. So to start, we would like to list all our servers and connect them to the installed applications and connected backups.
The following sketch helps us to design our documentation:
Step 1: Create Metadata Fields
As an example, let’s create different types of metadata fields:
Link fields
The field type link is one of the most important field types which we will be using in this example since it is used to connect servers, applications, and backups.
To avoid a connection to an application in the link field Backup and vice versa via autocompletion, we can employ a filter in the field configuration.
To configure a filter you can use the Lucene search syntax.
In our example, we would like to force a connection to the defined metadata set Backup.
Filter/Lucene syntax
metadataset:metadataset.backup |
Step 2: Create Metadata Sets
To use the created fields within the Confluence pages, we have to create metadata sets.
Thus, we create a set for Server, Application, and Backup and add the required fields to them.
Step 3: Create Templates
Using metadata couldn’t be easier so let’s create page templates and connect them to the metadata fields.
First, we create the template for a server page. We want to display the metadata assigned to the particular page so we need the macro display metadata.
If you want to split the displayed metadata across different areas on your page, you can filter them by using the option “metadata fields filter” in the macro configuration.
You just need to add the particular metadata field keys and separate them with commas. You can use this method, too, if you want to change the order in which the metadata fields are displayed.
Now we can create the page templates for applications and backups.
We also want to display the assigned metadata but the display metadata macro does not show the connected server because this information is stored in the metadata set Server.
To get this information we need to use the metadata overview macro which generates a Confluence-wide metadata report based on Lucene search syntax.
In this case, we would like to display all the servers which have links to the current page in the fields Application or Backup.
The value $content.id appears on every page which has a link to the current page in the specified link field.
Filter criteria: Backup
global.metadatafield.backup:$content.id |
Filter criteria: Application
global.metadatafield.application:$content.id |
We now have all the templates we need.
Step 4: Create Pages
Let’s create a page for Application and another for Backup. When creating pages we need to fill out the metadata sets first, then we can create a page for the category Server, fill in the metadata and connect the Application and Backup pages in the link fields.
And that’s it! It doesn’t get much simpler than that!