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What you can do using annotations

The annotation feature enables you to define information that relates to objects in your environment and then track the objects based on the annotation.

For example, you could add building or floor number annotations to devices in your environment. Additionally, you might want to look at all devices in a specific data center or business entity and determine which business entity is using the most tier 1 storage. To do this, you assign a data center, business entity, or tier annotation to the device using the OnCommand Insight Client. Then, you can bring selected user-defined annotations from OnCommand Insight into Data Warehouse. You want to do this to see the annotation values assigned to objects appear in your custom reports.

For details about creating annotations in OnCommand Insight, see the OnCommand Insight Inventory User Guide for the Java UI.

You can specify which user-defined annotations propagate to Data Warehouse. Annotations are added as additional columns to the object table in the inventory, and to the relevant dimension table in the data marts. When you update the annotations on resources using the OnCommand Insight user interface and initiate or wait for the next Data Warehouse build, you see the results in the following tables:

Ensuring annotations entered in OnCommand Insight are included in Data Warehouse requires the following major processes:

When you upgrade Data Warehouse, the annotations job runs automatically during the database restore process. The annotations job runs automatically also when JBoss starts up.

Note: JBoss is an application server where the OnCommand Insight Java code runs and is needed for both for the OnCommand Insight server and for Data Warehouse.