Enriching metadata

IBM Spectrum® Discover can enrich the metadata from supported platforms with additional information by using policies, action agents, and custom tags.

Tags

Custom tags are key:value pairs that are added to the IBM Spectrum Discover metadata record that allow the user to manage, report, and search for data by using newly applied information. The custom tags act as an extension of the system metadata that can contain organizational information beyond the view and limits of the source storage system. This information can be used for roll-up type aggregation and reporting or for targeted searching on specific values to find needles in haystacks.

Policies

Policies are used to add additional information about the source data that is indexed in IBM Spectrum Discover. A policy determines the set of files to add tag values to or send to an action agent through filtering criteria. The policies give the user the ability to run actions one time or on a set schedule. Policies do work in batches and can be paused, resumed, stopped, and restarted. The user can control the load on the IBM Spectrum Discover system and on the source storage system in the case of deep inspection policies.

Action agents

A deep inspect action agent does the work of extracting information from source data records and returning it to IBM Spectrum Discover to be indexed. For example, by using a custom action agent, a user might create a DEEPINSPECT policy to extract key characteristics from files of a certain type. The characteristics are applied to the metadata records for the files in IBM Spectrum Discover as custom tags and made searchable. A user can search for data by name, size, and content.