Administration Guide

Conflict Policy

When the Inventory Server processes audit snapshots, it attempts to match computers from the audit snapshots to existing Computer records in the Alloy Discovery database. In order to uniquely identify computers and prevent the system from creating duplicate Computer records, Alloy Discovery uses the conflict policy.

The conflict policy defines a number of rules. Those rules are referred to as conflict resolution rules, because the Inventory Server considers a potentially duplicate Computer as a conflict that must be resolved.

A conflict resolution rule consists of the following components:

  • Rule conditions — Conditions compare identification data of existing Computers with data from audit snapshots. Each condition consists of the following components:
  • Computer identification fields:
    • Serial_Num — the computer’s serial number;
    • Computer_Name — the computer name;
    • MAC — the MAC address of the network adapter.
    • NOTE: Since Alloy Discovery 8.02, the conflict policy no longer uses the MAC address attribute as a unique computer identifier during the default resolution procedure, only resolution rule conditions denoted by Serial_Num and Computer_Name are used by default. If you want to enable resolution rule condition denoted by MAC identification datails, modify the Automatically overwrite duplicate records where 2 fields are equal rule as needed. For details, see Modifying Conflict Resolution Rules.

  • A comparison operator:
    • equals
    • does not equal
    • matches
    • does not match
  • Rule Action — If the rule meets the conditions, the Inventory Server performs this action. The following actions are available:
    • If found then overwrite an existing computer — This action overwrites the Computer record in Alloy Discovery with the audit snapshot data.
    • If found then put in the Conflict List for manual resolving — This action allows you to review the conflicting Computer records and resolve the conflict manually.