Duplicate entries in the R_ Tables

[Rob Buxton]

Hi All,
This may have been covered before but I thought I'd tried the suggested fixes.

We've been running HPSIM 4.1 SP1 for quite a while.
Disabled WBEM as I'd seen this was contributing to duplicate reporting entries.
We added a new Server a few days ago.
Ran a report and found 8 entries for the new Server in the Inventory Report.
So, I queried the database directly using excel / msquery and selected all columns from the R_Inventory Table and just the Server I was interested in.
There's 10 entries, 8 of these have a SnapshotID of -1, the other two a 13 digit number. I can't see any difference in the remaining entries.

I've also seen comments about deleteing all Servers and re-adding them, well that is not appropriate here. We use the Historical Data and I stopped our old CIM 7 quite some time ago. The loss of Historical Data would be a real pain.

So, is there likely to be any improvement in the reporting from the Reports Tables in HPSIM 4.2?
Anything I can do in the meantime?
Any reason that there's multiple entries all over the place in the Reporting Tables?

[Raymond Kim]

First off, I'm a newbie to this forum, and this is my first post.

I've been having similar problems -- I've been using the DB utilized by CIM/SIM in order to populate our own server DB (which we use to maintain inventory, among other things).

Part of the issue is the DB infrastructure between SIM 4.1 and CIM 7. In CIM 7, the R_ tables were exactly that -- tables. In SIM 4.1, the R tables are NOT actually tables -- they are VIEWS. The R_Inventory view in SIM 4.1 is derived from (I think it was) four tables, one of which is CIM_ComputerSystem.

I came across scenarios where this table seems to be picking up virtual server names and alternate names for machines. You might have multiple entries in the CIM_ComputerSystem table that are using the same NodeID (DeviceKey). Because the R_Inventory uses NodeID/DeviceKey to define its JOIN, you could have multiple R_Inventory entries but will see only one device name (because the R_Inventory view does not display the machine names in the CIM_ComputerSystem table).

I've been trying to find a workaround to this myself (so far, to no avail).

[Rob Buxton]

That sounds about right. I've been unable to determine what circumstances produce the result. But certainly one of the Servers was a new build that was originally discovered while it was still a WorkGroup Server, later it was added to the domain. I'm wondering if that populated something twice but with slightly differing entries.

[Raymond Kim]

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Like I said earlier, one of the "slight" differences is that the CIM_ComputerSystem may have multiple name entries that have the same node ID. I've also noticed that these different entries (for the "same machine") may have different DeviceStatus, ProductType, or ServerRole entries -- just enough of a difference so that they're not unique entries.

I took the SQL code for the R_Inventory view and added the "distinct" keyword to it. Immediately, it dropped 100 rows. I also did a "group" and "order by" on the DeviceKey column, and added CIM_ComputerSystem.name next to the DeviceName column for sake of comparison; this was how I discovered it was picking up duplicate names for the same machine (including some names that I thought were long since dead).

I also read an earlier forum posting about how some net names are being picked up as IP addresses. I am getting some of these here as well, and in some cases, are contributing to this multiple line issue.

Like I said, I don't have a solution, but one of the ideas I'm considering (I have yet to actually try this) is to create a view on a separate database (since I don't want to do this on the SIM DB) that mimics the R table structure, creating some functionality to populate it, and modifying the scripts so it ignores the duplicate entries.

[Rob Buxton]

Workaround was to delete those servers with duplicate entries. This was not ideal.