In specific situations, duplicate assets can be generated in your inventory. These duplicate assets could be intended or unintended. To handle these duplicates, we introduced asset deduplication in Cloud. This helps you identify these duplicates and solve the duplication conflicts. It also allows you to prevent these duplicates from showing up again in your inventory.
How asset deduplication works
Assets that share the same MAC address, model and serial number will be identified as possible duplicates. Duplicate assets will be marked with a duplicate icon in the Inventory > All Assets view.
All duplication conflicts can be viewed in the Inventory > Duplicate conflicts menu.
Solving a duplication conflict
To solve a duplication conflict, you can either click on the icon next to the duplicate asset, or on the same icon on the Duplicate conflicts view. After clicking on the duplicate icon, you have the following options:
- None are duplicated
- Yes, solve the conflict
When clicking None are duplicated, the assets will remain in your inventory, and they will be flagged to not show up as duplicates any longer.
When choosing Yes, solve the conflict, you will proceed to the next step where you can mark the duplicate asset(s) and the one(s) you want to keep.
After clicking continue, you can select the asset(s) you want to keep in your inventory.
Before selecting Solve duplicate conflict, you can indicate if you want to delete the duplicate assets from your on-prem installation as well. If you choose to delete the duplicates from the local web console, they will be automatically deleted from your on-prem inventory.
Please note that when no scanning exclusion is present for these assets, they could potentially be scanned again and synced with Cloud. To prevent this, make sure to add a scanning exclusion in your on-prem installation. If you don't check the option to delete the assets from the local web console, they will instead be flagged in your on-prem installation to not be synced again to Cloud.
