Custom properties

Custom properties are a powerful feature to enrich SKOOR objects:

provide additional information to objects for use in alarms, dashboards etc.
prepare objects to dynamicly build object trees (e.g. automatically link measurements to service objects)
dynamically pull objects together in dashboards
filter and search objects

Custom properties can be inherited in object trees.

Configuration

Custom Properties can be enabled for specific object types only or for all objects. The content of the fields can be imported/exported to Excel .csv files.

To add a new custom property, click the + button below the list of currently existing custom properties:

Only users of type Administrator can add, modify or delete custom properties.

Name

The custom property's name.

Abbr.

An abbreviation of the custom property's name (optional).

Key

A property key may be defined for use in filter definitions in the SKOOR dashboards. If defined, it must be unique (optional).

ID

For internal purposes only (optional).

Type

Text	A standard text field. This type of property can be inherited to underlying objects in the SKOOR object tree.
`Password`	Used for hidden content, usually a password.
`Reference`	A reference to another custom property from the object itself or from other objects.
`Boolean`	A boolean property can be either true or false. It shows up as a checkbox, when configured.
`Enumeration`	Enumerations define a set of text and corresponding value pairs. Can be used for mapping of integers to text or forobject classification like: “Availability”, “Performance”, “Capacity” etc. If Enumeration is chosen as a custom property type, an additional column appears to the right of the Enumeration column, where the actual enumeration can be entered, e.g. 1=IPv4,2=IPv6 or 1=Business KPI,2=Technical KPI,3=End-to-end KPI This type of property can be inherited to underlying objects in the SKOOR object tree.
`Long text`	A text field that supports multiple lines of text.
`Timestamp`	Displays the current time in the time zone that is set as the property value.

Visibility

The Visibility fields define where and how the custom properties are visible. For the OPM, custom properties are visible or clickable within the alarm list. Clickable properties do also work in the object details screen in the UI and dashboards.

Attributes

The characteristics of a custom property can be defined as follows:

`Unique`	The content of a property must be unique system-wide. This is used for e.g. 3^rd party references like a CMDB ID.
`One instance`	Only one instance of a property may be defined per object, useful e.g. for serial numbers.
`Read only`	A read only property can be assigned once. Also used for 3^rd party references.

Object Types

New custom properties are available on all SKOOR objects by default. This is reflected by the Any column checkbox being selected. To make new custom properties available to specific object types only, uncheck the Any column, then uncheck all columns where the custom property should not be available.

Usage

The number of objects in SKOOR, where the correpsonding custom property is configured. To delete a custom property, it must have a usage count of 0, otherwise the “-“ button is greyed out and not clickable.

Property ID, Object ID and Value ID

Each custom property has a property ID which is assigned automatically when adding the property and it cannot be changed. This is not the ID described above.

The property ID is shown when moving the mouse over the custom property's Name field.

This property ID can be referenced (e.g. in Execute job script fields). For example, the custom property with property ID 5 is the custom property Serial No. It exists by default. When referencing it, its current value is returned, if the property is configured in the object's parameters. Otherwise, nothing is returned.

The ID can be referenced in various ways, either as Property ID, Object ID or Value ID:

Reference	Type of reference	Returned property value
$PID_5$	`Property ID`	Always references the value of the Comment custom property on the object it is configured on, except if it's configured on a job object. There it references the value of the Comment custom property configured on the job's parent device, except if the parent device doesn't have the custom property configured.
$OID_5$	`Object ID`	The Object ID is used when the custom property of a job needs to be referenced, not the custom property of its parent device.
$VID_5$	`Value ID`	The Value ID is always unique. It references the actual value of a custom property on a specific object. The Value ID of a device or job can be seen when hovering over the object's custom property in its Show details or Edit parameters mode.

Usage

After configuring Custom properties in the admin section, they can be applied to objects in the SKOOR Engine in two ways.

Set custom properties on objects

Setting custom properties on an object is simple. In the respective section of the edit pane, select the property and assign the required value to it:

Configure links

Clickable custom properties can be configured to open an URL. Especially if the URL is long, a name can be assigned to it which will be displayed instead of the URL itself:

Edit pane:

Detail pane:

Inherit custom properties to child objects

Custom properties of type text and enumeration can be inherited to child objects. This is a very powerfull feature when custom properties have to be set in large object trees. If, for example, a template device with multiple jobs has to be instantiated several times and the custom property Location should be set on all jobs, it is quite a bit of work to get this done on all device instances. As the Location is a custom property of type text, this can be achieved very easy by setting the specific Location on the device object and inherit it to all child jobs at once.

If a custom property should be inherited to all objects in a subtree but is not yet configured on all child objects, the pass on feature can be used. If clicked, the SKOOR Engine will configure the respective property on all objects below the current one:

Inheritance of text properties

On child objects that should inherit a property from a parent, the property value must be set to "?":

If the parent object has the same property set to a value, it will be displayed in the detail pane of the child object:

Inheritance of enumeration properties

Enumerations have a separate item in the value dropdown to get the value from the parent object: