Entity families can be organized into a hierarchy so that one family is defined as a subfamily of another family. By creating a hierarchy, you can enhance clarity.
When you look at the baseline Meridium Enterprise APM database, you will see that some families are further divided into subfamilies. For example, the Recommendation family contains several subfamilies that define the types of Recommendation records that you can create.
As you customize your database, you will need to look at all of the different groupings of items that you will manage in Meridium Enterprise APM. You need to divide these items and name each group, which will become your families. Next, you need to look for situations where one item is a type of another item. In some cases, you may want to create a family that helps form your hierarchy but to which you would not directly save records.
Consider an example where you create three families: Failure, Equipment Failure, and Shutdown. These families are distinctly different, but they also share some commonality: a shutdown is a type of equipment failure, and equipment failure is a type of failure.
If you set up your hierarchy so that all of these families are stored at the root level, there would be no connection between them to organize the families logically. A better choice would be to set up families and subfamilies like this:
>Failure
In this example, the Failure family is the root family of the Equipment Failure family, and the Equipment Failure family is the root family of the Shutdown family.
Each root level will be useful for defining data that is common to its sub-levels. In addition, the metadata is well ordered based on the type of data that is being collected.
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