while working on deploying fleet, I noticed this happens a lot with our test machines: the agent is restarted and it suddenly shows up as another asset, despite having the same name and mac address. the only difference is the IP address (one is from the office, one is from my house) is there any way to dedupe clients?

This usually happens when osquery/Launcher is deployed in such a way that the instance restarts using a different database path. An IP changing should not cause a duplicate, because hosts are uniquely identified by their node key.

what's a database path? the local db that osquery uses for snapshotting etc?

Yep, that explains it. If you don't specify

--root_directory

Launcher will create a new temp path each time it starts.

ha, okay! thank you