While helping a client troubleshoot some FAST full text indexing issues with their Documentum 5.3sp6 environment, I came across some tools that proved to be helpful during the troubleshooting process.

I’m sure we’ve all encountered the scenario where a full text search takes a long time to return with results.  As a first step, it’s always helpful to query the FAST index directly, outside of any Documentum interface, such as Webtop. This way you can pinpoint if the slowness is being caused at the index level or at the application level.  Fortunately, FAST provides us with a search tool that we can use for this purpose.

The only thing you need to know in order to access the search tool is the installation base port number that was chosen upon installing Index Server in your Documentum environment.  Once you have that, the search tool can be accessed at the following URL:

http://<Index Server Host>:<Installation Base Port + 2100>

Example:

Installatation Base Port = 14000
URL to search interface = http://<Index Server Host>:16100

For the Query field, specify what value you want to search for and enter it in the following format, depending on whether you’re doing an attribute search or a search on content:

dmftmetadata:’search term’

or

dmftcontents:’search term’

or combine the two

dmftcontents:’search term’ and  dmftmetadata:’search term’

The search will result in an XML file that outlines the total number of documents that match those criteria and provides details on each document, as well as the total time it took to retrieve the results.

Other search keywords that can be used within the Query field can be found in the index-profile-dctm.xml file, stored in the following location:

$FASTSEARCHindex-profilesindex-profile-dctm.xml

The FAST admin tool can also be helpful to get a high level overview of how your indexing environment is operating.  We used it mainly to monitor how fast the number of documents in our collection was increasing, but there are several other functionalities available as well, as shown in the screen shot below:

The FAST admin tool can be accessed at the following URL:

http://<Index Server Host>:<Installation Base Port + 3000>

Example:

Installation Base Port = 14000
URL to admin interface = http://<Index Server Host>:17000

Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions about full-text indexing.