Mysterious new duplicate entries

[crashff]

I've had Lansweeper running for a while now, and since updating to 5224, some of our monitors have been randomly appearing as new duplicate entries. If I delete the new duplicate entry, it still comes back. They're easy to find because they show up as with a name in the format of 'MFG 21341315431435' which doesn't match the naming scheme I use. This re-detection is giving them different asset numbers, so none of the additional asset information I've previously entered is being carried over. The problem is that this sudden re-detection of monitors as new assets is screwing up my reporting for fixed assets for taxes.

I have noticed that originally, the monitors had a unique key like this: 2efa464c-0289-4411-bcdb-db65699bbae1
Now, the unique keys are showing up like this: Mon:DEL:Y42994BKBBQC

Can this function either be reverted back to the way it was, or can a script be written to fix this?

[Susan_A · Accepted solution]

Updating to the latest Lansweeper release and then deleting the faulty monitor assets (with the random string for internal ID) should resolve the issue. You should no longer see internal ID changes upon editing the scanned monitor assets.

[crashff]

I have not been manually creating the assets. I let Lansweeper scan them in, then I updated the information for them because Lansweeper enters the serial numbers automatically.

Your note about the internal ID changing sounds like it may be what happened, as it seems to only be narrowed down to a dozen monitors that were scanned and updated within the past 2 months.

[Susan_A]

What you are seeing is "normal" if you've manually created monitor assets up until now and updated from a Lansweeper version that did not yet scan monitors as separate assets. The internal ID of a scanned monitor asset follows a strict format that includes the monitor manufacturer and serial, while the internal ID of a manually created asset without a MAC or IP is a random string. This behavior cannot be changed. If you manually create a monitor asset, but scan the monitor asset as well, you'll end up with two separate assets with two separate internal IDs. Lansweeper can't know that these assets are in fact one and the same.

Two possible solutions to avoid duplicates:

• Exclude the monitor asset type from scanning, delete any scanned monitor assets that were already generated and only use your manually created assets to track monitors. You'll still be able to see scanned monitor data on computer webpages, but no monitor assets will be generated during scanning.
  
• Update to the latest Lansweeper release, delete your manually created assets and submit your custom changes on the asset pages of the scanned assets instead. (It's important to update, as pre-5.2.0.27 releases contained a bug that would cause internal IDs of scanned monitor assets to change upon editing.)