Network Management

Disable Duplicate Detector for Discovery Engine in the SolarWinds Platform

Nodes are not being discovered through Network Discovery but they can be added manually without any issues.

First published date

11/29/2018 10:48 PM

Last published date

6/4/2026 5:23 PM

Overview

The Duplicate Detector may be removing selections if nodes are duplicated on entries such as MAC address, SysName, or DNS.

Turning off this option allows the use of Network Discovery to add these nodes in bulk regardless of the check.

 

Product section

Network Performance Monitor

Cause

  • There are duplicates for one entry after running Network Discovery with verbose logging turned on.
  • The Duplicate Detector did not allow the Network Discovery to list these.

Error found in the web console when performing a network discovery:
Node xxxxx import status skipped, already exists in SolarWinds Platform DB.
Node xxxxx is already managed by NCM.

image.png
 

Resolution

Resolution 1:

 

If this occurs during the discovery job itself, this is de-duplicating the same nodes within the same discovery profile
 

  1. RDP the main server and stop the services.
  2. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\SolarWinds\Orion\ and edit the SolarWinds.Orion.Discovery.Job.dll.config in a Notepad as an admin.
  3. Scroll to bottom of the file and look for the following tags:  
    <add key>="DisableMacDuplicateDetector" value="false" />
<add key>="DisableSysNameDuplicateDetector" value="false" />
<add key>="DisableDNSDuplicateDetector" value="false" />

  4. Change the values to True.
  5. Save the file and start the services.
  6. Run Network Discovery and verify that all undiscovered nodes are there.

 

Note: Revert to the previous (or default) setting if you experience issues caused by this change.

 


Resolution 2:

 

If this occurs during importing discovery results, this will occur still regardless of the first resolution since it is designed differently due to a calculation based on weights (e.g. in default: two devices have same sysname, but different MAC and DNS then it is not duplicate, etc

 

To view these settings (SysName, DNS and MAC) please follow these steps:
1. Connect to your SolarWinds Server.
2. Click on start and search for Database Manager.
3. Once the application is open, click on add Orion Server.
4. Navigate to Settings.


Screenshot of the settings table under Database Manager:

Discovery-Import-SysNameDeDuplicator-Weight 25
Discovery-Import-DNSDeDuplicator-Weight 27
Discovery-Import-MacDuplicateDetector-Weight 26


If you change the weight of the current value for one/any of these related items to 0, then duplicate detection will not occur for such item (sysname, dns or mac)