How can we get rid of Computers in AD Import?

[nrousseau1]

This is with great emotion I am writing this first post as Flexera alumni 🙂 and hope Chris G (or other sharp Flexera experts) can share his always helpful views!

One thing that has kept me very busy as a Flexera Consultant, Product Manager and now Indépendant Consultant now is the issue with merged computers (In Inventory Manager).

Some "accidents" that are pretty frequent cause duplicates in Inventory Manager, and NDI files for the same computer will alternatively update multiple duplicate records in Inventory Manager... We finish with records for the same devices that have different dates of inventory (difference is in years sometimes) and linked to file and installer evidence data, which is causing false positives in application inventory once the data is re-merged in FNMS Compliance tables.

The trick in import that uses the LatestImportedComputerPerConnection view from 2020R2 and "skims" evidence records keeping only the one from the latest does unfortunately not always fix the issue (when there are multiple inventory dates (SW, HW, Services) in the records). The Merged Devices Issues Analysis report in the SAM provides transparency on this issue but doesn't solve it. 

Hours of observation show that beyond agent upgrade (from a version before the agent UID and a version after UID),  computers created by AD are a great cause for these duplicate records. A case of a French customer who got recently all older duplicate records of the pairs deleted in Inventory Manager (9000)

• The next day, 9000 new computers came into the "All Inventory" screen of ITAM. With very limited information: no operating systems, no applications... in my view, created by AD. They all had a brother record (with full information) in "all Inventory".
• The following days these records have been gradually re-merged with the records with information (so, they disappeared from the all inventory screen that showed less and less duplicates) because the records got completed with NDI information and got merged with other records in ImportedComputer table.

Hence my questions to experts:

• Does this AD Computer / NDI Computer explanation fly?
• If it does, why are we importing computers from AD?
  • I would see an interest of creating "discovered devices" when no inventory device exists (to get the full picture like the VMs Inventory Gaps report uses vCenter data to showing missing inventory)
  • But having the records invisible and merged with NDI data has no interest
• If importing computers has limited interest and high risk, how do we filter out computers from the AD import? The out of the box import does not use a reader that could be customized, I suspect the import logic is in a compiled file...

 Thanks all for your lights.

Nicolas