Duplicate CIs when they are not duplicates

[Sarah56]

Hello,

We have multiple customers in our CMDB, and I have created a business application CI that have the same name across multiple customers.  When I look at my CMDB dashboard I see that all these BA's are showing up as a duplicate, thinking because the identification rule is set to name.  The only unique identifier is company though, but there is no company to choose from in the identification rule.  I thought maybe I try adding an inclusion rule, and selected company is different from company, but then that didn't get rid of them from the dashboard either.  Is there any other way I can stop having these BA's show up as duplicate on the dashboard? 

[#2]

The simplest solution would be to prefix or postfix the name of the business application with the company name.  This way the name would be unique.  You could even write a business rule on the table to do this for you when a new business application is inserted.  You would have to handle the existing ones, and that could be done via a script.

[Sarah56]

Thank you.  I am not sure I can do that, there are a few thousand separate companies and the names are pretty long on some. I think there is a character limit on the field. I could maybe create a pattern Serial Number, but there is nothing that can be done on the Identification rules at all? 

[#4]

Currently the max length is 255 charachters so it is rather long.

The IRE doesn't currently support reference fields as identifiers so you can't add a rule on company.  You could create a new field and copy the text value of the company over to the new field then add that as part of the existing IRE rule.  The downside to this is custom and would require any new business applications to populate the custom field, otherwise you would fall back to the issue you currently have.

[Sarah56]

what if I just take the name Identifier out completely and leave it blank?  The BA's are manual entries I could add a different field that I can edit manually, but since there are almost 2000 different companies, it is a given that there will be duplicate BA's with the same name.  OOOORRRR!  I have a serial number field (it's not used for BA's)...hmmmm... I could add the company name in the serial number field and then add SN# as the identifier.  I think I will try that.