Environment
Topic
The agent deduplication setting gives system administrators the ability to have NinjaOne merge/re-enroll detected instances of duplicate devices.
For example, if the NinjaOne Agent on a device stops reporting properly and requires a manual uninstall and reinstall, the new device resulting of the reinstalled NinjaOne Agent can be automatically merged to maintain the historical Activity Feed data from the dormant device.
- Identifying Duplicate Devices
- Setting up Agent Deduplication
- Enabling Notifications for Re-enrollment Activities
Identifying Duplicate Devices
NinjaOne uses the following criteria to identify duplicate devices:
- Machine ID—this is a unique ID that the NinjaOne agent passes to the NinjaOne servers during registration. This ID consists of a unique ID for BIOS + the physical Mac address of network devices.
- Please note that because of this, adding/removing network devices will affect the Machine ID, and therefore will affect the deduplication logic.
- Organization—the new duplicate device must be registering under the same organization as the dormant device in order for them to be deduplicated/merged.
Setting up Agent Deduplication
Important Note: Only NinjaOne system administrators have the ability to enable or disable this setting.
- Click Administration in the left navigation pane and select General. The Settings page displays by default.
- Under the Installer Settings section, click Edit to the right of the Deduplication: Merge devices if a duplicate device is found on installation setting.
- Activate the toggle switch to turn on the setting. Click Save.
When a new duplicate device is found per the criteria listed above, the duplicates are merged automatically; however, it does not merge duplicates that existed prior to enablement. Once merged, the previous Activity Feed data is restored, and new activity entries are added to that feed moving forward.
Enabling Notifications for Re-enrollment Activities
A system activity is generated whenever a device merge event occurs. Like all other system activities, notifications can be enabled for this activity.
- Navigate to Administration > General > Activities.
- Click on the Device re-enrolled activity.
- Set the severity and priority settings for the event, choose any Notification Channels for alerting (if applicable), and choose whether or not to notify technicians. If you use NinjaOne Ticketing, you can also select an Activity Rule to use for creating tickets when the activity triggers. Then, click Save.
