Why correlation_id as a criterion attribute on Hardware table (for Identifier - IRE rules)

[Suggy]

OOB, for Hardware table, the first Identifier entry on HARDWARE table is 'correlation_id'. What is that field? How is it populated on Hardware table/its child tables? Are you using that field?

[-O-]

I can see that the identifier is no longer there starting with San Diego. Usually that field is meant to hold the id of the record in a different system - to facilitate coalesce on import. It might be legacy leftover from way before IRE was "invented". I mostly never use it (it is there on task too, for instance), because ti allows holding a single foreign id and now-days it is often that one record is synced with multiple systems and you need to store multiple correlation ids.

So I guess just wait till you upgrade to San Diego and then the problem will be gone by itself 🙂

[Marshall Parker]

It seems that the correlation_id is being used to store a foreign_id and is populated from discovery on some specific use cases [notably ESX Server and VM Instance when discovering VMWare virtualization space.

The field exists on the base CMDB table, but usage within IRE Identifiers is limited to only a handful of tables, most of the CMDB does not leverage this field.