Entity duplication
When you monitor a single physical or virtual device, application, or database by multiple agents or collectors, you may see multiple entities in the SolarWinds Observability SaaS.
Duplicate hosts
Consider the example of monitoring a single virtual machine, vm-01, using the following methods:
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The SolarWinds Observability Agent with the hostmetrics plugin
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The APM monitoring service running on the machine
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The Network Collector (nc-01) monitoring the machine via WMI and the hypervisor API
This would create the following three entities:
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Entity e-1: Virtual Machine
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Entity e-2: Host recognized as a Server (NcHost)
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Entity e-3: Host recognized as an agent-based monitored device (SolarWinds Observability Agent and APM)
Links between duplicate entities
To easily navigate between duplicate entities, find an entity in the Entity Explorer. In the Basics widget, search for the Monitored also as section.
Linked entities are identified based on BIOS UUID or a combination of cloud IDs. You can find these values in the Basics widget, in the Device Identifiers section.
What is a BIOS UUID?
A BIOS UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is a hardware-based identifier, tied to the device’s BIOS. This enables reliable linking of entities, such as a virtual machine and its corresponding Network Collector host.
What are cloud IDs?
When monitoring cloud instances, such as AWS EC2, Azure VMs, or GCP, entities are identified by a combination of identifiers (cloud IDs). This combination acts as a digital fingerprint across different data collection channels.
Cloud identifiers typically include:
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Cloud instance ID: The unique identifier assigned to the specific VM.
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Cloud zone ID: The data center location, such as us-east-1a.
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Cloud account ID: The identifier of the cloud subscription or project.
By comparing these IDs, the system can determine that an instance discovered through a cloud API is the same instance monitored by an internal Agent.
Subscription licensing impact
If a device is monitored through multiple channels but shares the same identifier (BIOS UUID or a matching set of cloud IDs), it is counted as a single entitlement.
Example: A machine monitored through WMI on a Network Collector and also detected as a virtual machine on an ESXi platform appears as two entities. If both entities share the same BIOS UUID, they are linked and counted as one entitlement.
Duplication in Azure resources
Entities are created for each Azure resource, and the display name of these entities are the Azure storage account names. However, Azure storage accounts can contain multiple resources. As a result, the Entity Explorer contains two entities with identical names for the Azure Blob Storage and Azure Files entity types.
Database/host duplication
In the following case, you can manually relate the entities to resolve the duplication.