Knowledge Base Search Tips

Finding Your Answer Fast...

The BMC Knowledge Base is designed to answer questions that are worded in plain, conversational English, just as you would ask them to another person.

Here are some tips and guidelines about asking questions and getting useful answers:

Enter complete questions in your own words
For example: What does ARERR 9280 mean?
If you are interested in a particular Product or Feature include that information in your question to get the most precise results
For example: Is Red Hat Enterprise 5.4 supported by the 3.7.40 Patrol Agent?

NOTE: Number matching is exact; 5.4 in the question will only match 5.4 in the content, not 5.4.1 and vice versa. The same is true for any non-numeric terms containing a period, e.g. including cmd.exe in your search string will only return content containing that exact string
Make your question concise
Simple directed questions work better than complex or multi-part questions.
Use correct spelling and grammar to get the most accurate answers
Correct capitalizations are not required, but can sometimes help to locate names and acronyms. Common spelling errors are corrected automatically.
Boolean operators are not necessary
Many search engines use words and symbols (such as AND, NOT, +, and -) as logical operators to define complex searches. The BMC Knowledge Base search engine does not rely on logical operators to construct search queries, but treats these words as ordinary parts of the question.
If you are interested only in answers for particular products or sources (e.g. only Product Documents)
Ask your question first and review the answers, the information you are looking for may have already been presented. If not, you can filter the answers using the list of content sources and product families on the left side of the answers page.
If you already know an ID for the item you can search using just the ID.
- For Knowledge Articles search on: KA<number> e.g. KA287239 [NOTE: No spaces between 'KA' and the number]
- You can also search on prior IDs for items, e.g. SLN000015101105

If you have an error or log message and are interested in exact matches or if you want to indicate elevated importance of certain terms in your question
The search engine will automatically assign a high relevancy to exact or close matches to the search question, but if you want to add more relevancy to exact term matches (i.e. rather than synonyms or terms with a common root, like run, runs, running) enclose the string in double quotes: e.g. "Refresh action failed in process SL during selection"

You can indicate the importance of a term, or part of a string, by enclosing it in double quotes. It is also acceptable to have several sets of double quoted text.

e.g. Failed to create reserved system field: "CMDBRowLevelSecurity"
e.g. loadplus for db2 “9.3.00” S0C4 [This will ensure that the product version number has significant influence on the answers presented]

Any exact matches will be presented at the top of the Answers, Any content containing some, or all, of the terms but not in the specified order will still be presented in the Answers but beneath any exact matches. i.e. enclosing terms within double quotes does not 'filter' the answers.

Reviewing answers
The best answers will be provided based on the search terms provided. Matches to those search terms will be indicated in the excerpts using highlighting. There are two types of highlighting:
- Individual search term matches are shown in Bold. You will see bolded terms for exact term matches and synonym or stemmed (e.g. run, runs, running) words.
- Yellow highlighting is provided to identify the text surrounding the matched terms
- NOTE: Answers are often based on a match with terms within the item's title, but because the title is used as the link to the content it is not possible to highlight these matches. So if there is no excerpt provided for an answer or the matches indicated within it are few or obscure, check the title as it may contain a number of matches.