View and/or Report for finding and cleaning up duplicate sessions

I cannot believe why there is nothing implemented like this yet!

We have +- 970 clients and if you reinstall one, you have to delete the old session...manually....

One of the ConnectWise employees told me to create a collection like this:

this creates a view like this:

now you can see how many items of one "name" are available.

Not a very convenient solution to scroll down 971 items to find the duplicates manually (hopefully).

It is not even possible to sort them...

Please help us, this is really annoying.

Thanks and best regards

Silas

@Joshua 

A report can be generated by using the Report Manager Extension. If you download as CSV it'll be pretty simple to filter down to existing dup sessions.

https://controlforum.connectwise.com/yaf_postst9106_Extension--Report-Manager--version-5-5-required.aspx

We have more than 3000 PC Clients. Every day there are more an more duplicate entries due reinstallation of client operating system. To clean up ConnectWise Control manually is not an acceptable solution.
Can you please implement a tool, thats allows us to search dublicate entries and to delete the oldest one?

Hi David, 

What sort of reinstallation are you performing? When reinstalling a client on the host page, there shouldn't be a second agent on your session list. Any additional information you can provide about the actions you're performing will help! We don't expect clients to be duplicating. 

Thanks!

This happens when a computer is renamed also. We image computers and give them a "STOCKxxxx" name where the X's are the asset tag number. Then, when we rename the device to deploy it for an end user, the old STOCK name still persists. Using something like the serial number and/or GUID is all that is needed. If the machine was just renamed, simply rename the old session. There's no need to create a new one at all. The same goes for a reimage. There's enough unique info about any one machine that multiple checks could be used. 

When a Windows client causes problems, our support staff often reinstall a computer. They don't want to waste time on time-consuming troubleshooting. This means that a Comuter OS will be reinstalled over an existing installation. The computer name remains the same than before.
Therefore the ConnectWise Client will be reinstalled on the computer, just like any other software. This will result in duplicate or multiple entries on the ConnectWise host page.

I'm also voicing my frustration at not having a more automated solution to dealing with duplicates. We support 14k+ Access nodes. We are currently dealing with a botched upgrade to the next version of Connect and had to roll back to the current. With all the auto-upgrades that occurred, we are having to uninstall and reinstall a lot of agents. So far this has produced over 2000 duplicates. Even just a simple check box option to delete them from Host page would be better than the current option of one at a time multiple clicks to remove. 

Hi Jeff, 

You can end and uninstall multiple agents from the host page simultaneously; checking multiple sessions exposes the option to end, uninstall, or end and uninstall multiples in the right hand column. Suggest implementing a session group of duplicates as described above, then clicking these duplicates and ending en masse. 

To be honest, we run into problems with partners accidentally ending or uninstalling their entire session list, so we don't want to necessarily make the ending process fewer clicks. We're investigating ways to make the ending or uninstalling process smoother for all use cases. 

Best, 

Caitlin  

Hi Caitlin

To built a sesstion group of duplicate entries with a session filter as descriped by Silas Sulser, is not a good solution if you have several thousend computers. The performance to build this session group is very bad and, even more importand, you can't sort this by number of multiple entries. The session group is automaticaly sorted bei computer name, which makes no sense in this case.. (Except, there is a way to change the sort order, which I don't know.)

I am very sure, a solution to find duplicate entries and to delete the oldest one would be very importand and helpful tool for a lot of your customers.

I'm just going to jump in here and say, this needs to be sorted.

The help desk team constantly re-image machines. Which re-installs the agent. The suggestion from Silas is half way to a feasible solution for me, but it should only populate the session group if there are duplicates. What is the logic to do that? There's no "isUnique" property that I see.

Here is how we do this... We've created two new groups... one of clients not connected for 90 days, and one of clients not connected for 180 days... then we make it part of our regular process to review disconnected clients every 90 days.

Our process is to end the old session when we deploy a new OS image... but this catches the ones that fall through the cracks, each disconnected session is investigated and then ended every 90 days. If were not sure, we may let it slide and we will catch it next time around in the 180 day filter.

another problem I found with removing duplicates. Sometimes, the reinstalled agent will not reconnect to the original entry in the console. This means that there is an extensive history timeline of events on the old agent Access session and the new one that is now active has no history.

If we remove the old duplicate, we lose all that access history. is there a way around this? To make sure we retain audit history? Can we force it to reconnect to the original entry in the console instead of creating a new entry?

There is a problem with Report: Only admin can use it, and in my case, I'm not.

At least I have the ability to create groups based on filters.

I found group filtering is an awesome and flexible tool to exploit for this type of things.

I'm doing maintenance, admin won't do it. So a simple variable, field, whatever is convenience to get this done, it would be much appreciated.

Via Comparison: I found an easier and exact way to find out duplicated hardware/devices (no duplicated name in this case): Serial #,
In my experience same device can be renamed for several common reasons (reimage, restocking, reinstalled agent, etc), but serial will always be the same.
Now, if we can find a way to compare among those. 
Chris Paetz got a nice method I will try.

After gazillion years... I came back to the same, but this time I fixed it by myself.

The idea is the same here proposed above by Silas Sulser , only this time instead to look for name (that can change or be duplicated) I go for Mac Address variable name, this is: GuestHardwareNetworkAddress
Yes, it will a list of many device you got, but you will see the EXACT duplication by the unique data: MAC Address.
Hope it helps you guys.