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Unable to mark a device or inventory as Ignored

Hi Community,

Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.

Recently some of my devices which we gathering inventory from SCCM/SMS are now having the FlexNet inventory agents and sending the the inventory through the agent.
due to which these devices started showing two entries, one with SMS and other one is FlexNet agent and they both are active.

But the last inventory date is not updating since the FlexNet agent is installed on them. So i thought to mark the inventory from SMS source as ignored but its not letting me do that as seen below into the screenshot. its not showing me the drop down menu on Status to mark it "Ignore",  I am the administrator and have the highest privilege access for the same. 

Any suggestion or work around.

unable to mark ignore.PNG

(7) Replies

@sushant_narula - This is because this Inventory Device is linked to a Hardware Asset and therefore the status of the Inventory Device is dependent on the status of the Hardware Asset.

Your options are:

1) This would be the Best Practice.  Open up the Hardware Asset and change the status to Disposed or Retired.  This will automatically change the status of the linked Inventory Device to "Ignored".

2) Go to the Active Inventory view.  Click on the checkbox for the Inventory Device.  There will be a button in the upper left that will be enabled that is labeled Remove Link.  If you click on this button, the Inventory Device will be unlinked from the Hardware Asset.  You can then change the status of the Inventory Device to "Ignored".  The downside to this approach is that you will now have an orphan Hardware Asset that is active and will not be linked to a device.

 

Hi,

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I remember FNMS have the option to merge the inventory if they come from 2 different sources, or to take into consideration the latest one, in this case I think the merging of inventory would be one solution.

 

@kclausen so here is one of the case, both are the same device, both are active, in both of them the source is SMS but the below one is the old inventory and and not updating.

both active.PNG

So when i opened the below one, which has the red pop icon as well and go to the linked asset, it is actually the same asset that is showing the latest inventory. you can see the error msg as well there.

With hardware asset that you are talking about in the first solution is the linked asset that you are asking to mark retired or disposed ?? If yes, than it wont be possible as the linked asset is the one which showing the latest inventory. 

vm properties.PNG

Thanks,
Sushant

@sushant_narula  There are two things here - 

There are two things specifics here-

1)To disallow from creating duplicates, you could use the three radio options present on the SMS integration on the inventory beacon application. Click on the SMS adapter and then use the overlapping inventory filter to either merge or ignore the inventory from SMS.
2)Also the reasons why you see the status field as non-editable - firstly, there is an asset associated with the inventory device. You may be aware of the asset to inventory device relationship so in your case, the inventory device for which you are trying to edit the status field already has an asset associated with it(you can check this by going through the assets tab) hence this field is not editable - once the asset is retired the linked inventory device will be marked ignored.

To maintain effective status for your inventory estate - try considering building a business adapter around your CMDB repository if there is one in your enterprise. This usually is the way to maintain the status integrity along with role data on your inventories in Flexera.

Regards
Cloaky

Hi @Cloaky 

Thanks for responding, currently the integration is set for possible merging.
So actually the issue is with two duplicate entries, both from SCCM at this time. 
You can see my second reply on this post which have the screenshots.

The inventory which is back dated and not good having the linked asset = "device which is giving the good inventory", basically its linked to its own name.
And that is why I can't mark ignore the linked asset. 

SCCM integration.PNG

You have to unlink it from the Asset and then you will be able to mark it as ignored. Then you can link the Flexera inventory to the Asset, and you won't have an orphaned Asset, and your new Inventory will be linked to the correct asset. We have had issues with this, too. For some reason FNMS is not recognizing both of the inventory items as being the same. We have logged several support cases about this, and the support staff has been able to resolve the problem on their side (we are in the Cloud). Don't know what would be required if your instance is on prem.

Erick Hacking, CSAM, CHAMP
IT Software Asset Manager, Lead Sr.

@EHacking - Thanks for the suggestion.
Yes you are right, I can see it now that be it the SMS or FlexNet agent inventory its getting duplicated whenever there are some changes of the linked asset or if the serial number of device getting changed on SNOW.

We have an On-Prem environment and I checked couple of inventories and their details on SNOW, I un-linked the old inventory and mark it ignored for some of them. I believe it should fix the issue, I kicked off a manual reconcile and will be checking if everything is seems to alright.

Thanks