Inventory device matching across imports

FlexNet Manager Suite version 2020 R2

A new management view available in the Discovery & Inventory menu lets you investigate how and why overlapping inventory records from multiple different inventory sources were matched and merged into the inventory device records in your compliance database, making the devices visible (for example) in the All Inventory listing.

This new Inventory Device Matching listing combines, in each row, data from three sources:

• The existing inventory device records in your database
• The raw, unprocessed inventory collected from all related sources that matched them
• The rules and attributes used to match these, either directly or "transitively" (a transitive match is one that goes through a "third party", such as when device A is matched to incoming inventory item B, and then item C is found to match item B – we say that item C is now "transitively" matched with device A as well).

If you leap directly into this new view (unfiltered), it's easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of data:

• There are multiple rows for every matched inventory device record, one for every match with incoming inventory from a particular source. Simply multiplying all your inventory devices by all your inventory sources may produce a very large number of rows.
• There are many properties available for your investigation, including a few from "under the covers" that have not previously been exposed in the web interface. These all allow you to directly compare the raw values reported by the inventory sources against the normalized data saved in your central compliance database.

However, the page is not intended to be read unfiltered, but used as a sharp investigative tool for analysis of issues with individual devices, using either the Search field or the simple or advanced filters to narrow down the data. Perhaps the easiest access of all is not directly on this page at all, but through a new Matched raw devices column available in the All Inventory page. If an inventory device has been matched by incoming inventory records from (say) three different sources, this column shows the count of three as a hyperlink. Clicking the number of matched raw devices brings you directly into the Inventory Device Matching page, pre-filtered for your investigation. In this example, it would show you three rows: each would repeat the same Inventory device properties from your database (for the device in the All Inventory page where you clicked the link); but each row would show one of the three different inventory imports of Raw inventory device properties that matched that device. Linking those two sides are the rules/properties used in the matching process. You can freely move columns into/out of the column chooser to see just the evidence you want to investigate.

The online help for this new page provides more information.