Any good knowledge object/dependency management techiques out there?

[dstaulcu]

So.. With a lot of reports that are dependent on lookup tables.. Dashboards dependent on saved reports, and so on, it's easy to break dependencies of you are not careful.

Short of manual regression testing every report, dashboard, etc, does anyone have any efficient techniques for verifying accessibility dependent lookup tables, macros, etc for reports. Or saved searches for dashboards?

I've been noticing a bunch of missing dependencies among reports I haven't visited in a while.. Was thinking we need an efficient way to see how broad such problems are.

Was also thinking if would be useful if the knowledge object management interface in splunk web provided some sort of dependency enumeration (and perhaps search and replace) upon request for delete or clone or rename, etc. Just thinking out loud.

Anyone run into problems like this? Have a good way to mananage such change?

[AndreasBalster]

I'm having the exact same issues, especially dependencies breaking and intransparency of the config.

I'd highly welcome the features you mentioned since it would greatly reduce the time and brains spent on finding all the dependencies which a certain knowledge object participates in.

For the time being, my approach to finding all the dependencies of an object is to grep for the object name. This of course does not always find everything (especially the metadata are good at hiding stuff since the object names in there are url-encoded...) and every change needs to be thoroughly tested.