Avoid duplicates when managing hosts both via hostname only and network discovery?

[mmansfie]

Hi!

I'm operating a Zabbix site where we want to both manage the hosts via Puppet and run network discovery (in order to catch un-managed hosts)... but across the same range of hosts. We'd like to be able to specify hosts in Puppet by DNS name rather than IP address, but network discovery then creates duplicates as discovery actions only use the IP address to identify unique hosts. We could ameliorate this somewhat by making Puppet decline to overwrite the interface, but then we would still run into duplicates if Puppet created hosts before they would be network discovered.

We're thinking of some other methods:
- moving the discovered hosts into a separate view group and not even monitoring them, just using them as a list of hosts on the network to be compared to the list of host managed by Puppet
- using Puppet to determine if the host is managed by puppet, then fill in something into the agent metadata to prevent network discovery actions from firing
I'm not stoked by either of these methods. Do people have other methods to use to fix this issue?

I'm running this on Zabbix 7.0 LTS but if newer features would help this (I haven't found any) I'd be happy to try upgrading.

Thanks!
Mac