Any way to clean up assets that no longer exist?

[mca-pgallagher]

Basically, one of our use cases for LanSweeper is as an asset management system. In this, LanSweeper is unparalleled, other than one rather unfortunate quirk that I'm hoping someone knows how to fix.

As devices get reformatted / reassigned, the name of the system will invariably change, but Lansweeper does not update when that name is changed. Instead, it creates a new asset. Perhaps that's on purpose, but it makes our asset count and database grow because it's counting the devices sometimes up to five times.

I've been manually deleting them as I see them, but I would love it if there were some way to merge (best way), archive (decent way), or delete them.

[Rob_B]

We are having the same issue, even though rename detection has been enabled since we installed Lansweeper months ago. There were several systems identified as vulnerable to the WannaCry ransomware using the query in another post here. We were about to unplug and delete those machines from active directory, Lansweeper, and our reserved DHCP firewall when one of the technicians remembered she'd renamed one of the computers weeks ago. Further investigation revealed that several other systems had also been renamed. Presently we wonder if rename detection is working as it should.

[mca-pgallagher]

Interesting. In this scenario, I took the time to look into those values and it's an odd thing - yes, for all 4 one thing is different, but it's weird how for three of them, the model was different :

LENOVO_MT_20A7rbon 2nd_BU_Think_FM_ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2nd
20A7002QUS
ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2nd

The latest (correct) one is Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2nd

Any way to figure out why it would have detected weird differences in the model? It looks as if one was a database error or something, since it tried to get it right and it got screwed up, but the 20A7002QUS vs Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2nd is where I'm confused - why did it detect it differently like that :-S

[Bruce_B]

Windows rename detection will only merge Windows assets that have the exact same value scanned for the following fields:

• tblAssets.Mac
  
• tblAssetCustom.Model
  
• tblAssetCustom.SerialNumber

If any of those values is blank or doesn't match, a merge will not happen. We've chosen these 3 values, as when those are matching when scanned, we can be reasonably sure we're dealing with the same asset.

[mca-pgallagher]

So I already have the Windows Rename Detection turned on :-S

Any way to see why it's not working?

[Bruce_B · Accepted solution]

If the devices in question are Windows computers, there is a feature available that will merge them. Assets are merged based on matching MAC, serial and model with Windows Rename Detection. More information on this feature can be found here.

For non Windows assets, you could make use of automatic clean-up options, which are outlined in this article. By default no asset clean-up options are active, but you can configure and enable them under Configuration\Server Options.