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Our example describes a simple IT landscape consisting of several servers on which applications run. Find or create a Confluence Space for your IT documentation. For each server and each application, we create a wiki page — these have properties and relationships that are maintained via metadata.
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1. Create Content Categories
In space administrationConfluence general administration, Content Categories entry: Let's create content categories with metadata fields for each property. The metadata can have different field types: Text gives you the opportunity to let the user fill in the metadata field with a simple text string. Multi select gives the user the option to select several values from several elements coming from a dropdown menu. Single select gives the user the option to select one value from several elements coming from a dropdown menu. With Page link fields you can draw connections, for example, to existing pages. Our latest update allows administrators to mark metadata fields as required, ensuring important information is never missed.
The table below shows you which fields you need and how you could configure them:
Corresponding Content Category | Field name | Field type | Field description | Required field? | Example values |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Server | IP | Text | IP-Adress | - | |
OS | Single select | Operating system running | Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 | ||
Location | Single select | Location of the System (Datacenter/Room) | Datacenter 1, Datacenter 2, Datacenter 3 | ||
Last Maintanance Date | Date | The most recent date when maintenance was completed. | 14.05.2025 | ||
Tags | Multi Select | Categorization labels describing role, priority, or technology. | Production, Database, Critical, VM, Legacy | ||
Application | Server | Page link | Link to Server where the App runs | - | |
Status | Single select | Status of the application | OK, Failure | ||
Maintainer | Single User | The team or user accountable for the application lifecycle. | e.g John Smith | ||
Dependencies | Multi Select | External services or components required for this application to run. | Database, API Gateway, Redis Cache | ||
Enviroment | Single Select | The lifecycle stage the app runs in. | Production, Staging, QA, Development |
To use our metadata fields, they have to be included in content categories. For this case, we create a content category for each Server and Application.
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Now we can add the required fields easily. Click on "Add Metadata field" and choose the fields we've listed in the table above:
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With the use of the “Display Metadata” macro, we can display all properties metadata of Server or Application. Interesting here is the macro "Metadata Report" - you can use it to list applications that are hosted on that server. The corresponding filter for that we'll add after creating a server page.
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Here's how the Server main page looks after:
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With Live Filters, users can interactively filter server lists by Location, OS, or other metadata fields directly in the report view.
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Well done!