FlexNet Agent and Tanium on AIX not merging inventory devices

[dbeckner]

We are encountering an issue with merging inventory devices between Tanium and the FlexNet Agent on AIX servers. Both Tanium and the agent are reporting inventory but they are not getting merged and I believe it is because the serial number is being reported differently. The version of FNMS we have deployed is 2019 R2 but we are using the 2021 R1 FlexNet agent. This concerning because of the FNM server license and also consumption of licensed software. Anyone encounter this and know how to resolve it?

Thanks,

Dan

[ChrisG]

The short answer is I think this sort of thing is likely to be difficult to resolve.

Using multiple inventory tools for Unix-like operating systems can be difficult, for the reason that you're observing here: different tools may gather different specific data as a "serial number", which will often defeat merging logic that attempts to identify records from different inventory sources that correspond to the same device.

It is generally easier and cleaner to limit yourself to only using a single tool to gather inventory from any individual computer running a Unix-like operating system. If you don't do that, you may need to take extra steps to manage multiple records that come in from different sources - such as having a process that sets the status of unwanted "duplicate" records to "Ignored".