When Lansweeper scans your assets (or when an asset is created manually), a unique identifier is created based on the scanned/submitted information. For non-Windows assets, this unique identifier is the MAC address of the asset (if Lansweeper was able to scan this information or if this information was provided). If the MAC address is not available, the IP address will be used instead. More information on this unique identifier can be found here.
When saving the scanned information in the database, Lansweeper will first check if this unique identifier already exists. If this is the case, the existing asset will be updated, and if not, the new asset will be added.
With this in mind, if a (newly) scanned asset (or one of the linked components) shares one (or more) MAC address(es) with another asset, the scanned asset will have the same identifier and could potentially merge or update the existing asset. Before merging assets with a shared MAC address, our merging logic will check on both the scanned MAC addresses and the scanned serial numbers to determine if non-Windows assets need to be merged. If two devices share MAC addresses, but Lansweeper detects different serial numbers during the scan, then they will not merge. Please note that manual serial number edits will not be taken into account for the merge logic. Only serial numbers that were detected during scans are used.
When an asset is merged into another asset, it should be listed in the Comments tab of the still-existing asset. Please note that there has to be an exact match; Lansweeper doesn't assume similar MAC addresses to be the same.
If your assets are being merged due to a shared MAC address, then you can use the workaround as described here to prevent them from merging: https://community.lansweeper.com/t5/general-discussions/merging-of-assets/m-p/48608
