Filtering Tricks - Notes on a Folder

One of the very handy features of Varonis DatAdvantage is the ability to add Notes to folders and other objects in the Work Area.  An example of where we use Notes on a regular basis is at the start of a remediation project.  We will have a standard security structure that we are going to apply to the folders that we care about.  For example, we will make sure that there is a group with Modify privileges, a group with Read Only privileges, and an Administrative group.  If there are problems with making that change immediately (let’s say that are number of direct user permissions or a number of groups with List permissions) the analyst can Add a Note to the folder and we can come back to it later to discuss with data owner and server teams.

This allows the analyst to maintain his focus on reviewing the server security and make sure that we have a comprehensive issues list that can be reviewed with other members of the organization.

One thing we would like to do is to be able to produce a list of all of folders that have Notes on them.  We are typically going to use the 4f – File System Objects List as are starting point.  However with the Notes on access path filter there is no ability to do a binary selection on whether a folder has a Note or not.  So what we do is create a selection that looks for vowels.

This way, if you utilize words in all of your notes then this will produce just folders that have notes.  We typically create this once, save as a filter and then whenever you need this functionality, just import the filter when you start building the report.

Happy filtering!