Hello, I need help understanding why we have duplicate records. One asset record is being manually entered and not discoverable, and the other is being created by our SCCM tool and it is being discoverable, but how do we stop it from creating duplicate records?
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My first question is why the manual entry if you have automation via SCCM to create the needed record?
Also it may not be a true duplicate if you differentiate on 2-3 attributes to make a unique key like: Hostname, Serial, NIC. Highly likely a duplicate exists if those three or similar unique key values exists across two or more records.
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This is about asset identification, which is uniquely identifying each asset, and asset reconciliation, which is about merging two discovered records and deleting one of the records so that there are not duplicates.
What ITAM tool are you using? Many of them have built-in reconciliation workflows. Ideally you would have your tool do this for you to avoid manual work. Most tools do this by comparing unique identifiers (such as serial number), or even using an algorithm/combination of attributes (as Bryant mentioned) to fingerprint the asset. ServiceNow, for example, has its Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE)
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I don’t know the answer to your question. I need to investigate why these were created manually. I have another question, maybe you can help me understand. We manually perform an ASN upload of hardware that is being shipped to us from vendor (for now its manually until we can automate this process), but my question is, once the hardware makes it to our Network, does the SCCM tool pick the hardware up and try to create new hardware records in ServiceNow? I am not seeing any duplicates for that equipment other than the duplicates I am seeing from 2021.
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@dinamac01 - To answer your duplicate records question…
First - eliminate the manual entry. Find out who they are and kindly ask them to stop. To rid yourselves of duplicates within ServiceNow, you can enforce the serial number to not allow duplicates (admin function) or you can enforce a script that is developed to within ServiceNow at the time of ingest (if one asset record has more fields populated AND it’s the most current, KEEP that record and automatically set the duplicate to retired or a non-active status)
For your ASN question, the file can be delivered to a secure FTP site that your ServiceNow instance has access to. You’ll have to properly map those fields into ServiceNow and test the connection with a few test runs before moving into production. When we did the ASN automation, we told our vendors that every time you ship us an asset (laptop, desktop, server, router, etc) - no peripherals you send us a file with serial number, PO number, cost, tax, shipping info and whatever you deem necessary).
Hope this helps.
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@dinamac01 I second what @JamesM says - get your system admins or your cmdb administrator to look at the IRE settings for SCCM and your manual imports (ASN and/or other). There’s a fair bit of advice/detail available for that up on the SN Community they can leverage to sort it out.
James
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