Avoiding duplicate instances

This behavior is a vestige of the original design, which was meant to handle SNMP tables that would reorder the entries:

Value > Alias
.0       > Foo
.1       > Bar

-reboot-
-active discovery-

Value > Alias
.1       > Foo
.0       > Bar


So the alias persists, but the value changes over time. The value is used when reporting the data, because SNMP generally uses those index numbers to lookup related info in other tables. This has been carried all the way through to batchscript collection where the key/value pair output looks like ##WILDVALUE##.key_name. I'm fairly certain ##WILDALIAS##.key_name will fail, even if you build the output correctly.

One nice thing is, all modules released within at least the last 4 years, generally generate unique wildvalues anyways, so at some point, I could see adding a toggle to each DS that just allows us to indicate a behavior change: "Wildvalue is unique/static". This would indicate that the collector should use the wildvalue to uniquely identify a given instance, and would allow us to handle the case where a name was updated (as we could confidently differentiate it from an actually new instance).

Totally understand the frustration about some of the nuts and bolts stuff, and it's stuff that occasionally hamstrung me as a Monitoring Engineer. Maybe surprisingly, we don't hear a lot of complaints about this behavior.

Filling out a quick feedback request in your portal, or via your CSM, will help me make the case to get this improved :)/emoticons/smile@2x.png 2x" title=":)" width="20">