Repeated false “Distro Version changed” events for AlmaLinux 8.10

Hello Observium Support,

we are seeing repeated false-positive distribution version change events for one of our monitored servers.

Affected device

Hostname: webdns002.fsit
Operating system: AlmaLinux 8.10 (Cerulean Leopard)

Problem description

Observium creates a new event approximately every five minutes with the following message:
 
 
 {{Distro Ver changed: 'AlmaLinux 8.10 (Cerulean Leopard)' ->
'AlmaLinux 8.10 (Cerulean Leopard)'}}
 
The old and new values are identical. There has been no actual change to the operating system, distribution, or version.

Expected behaviour

Observium should only generate a “Distro Version changed” event when the detected distribution string or version has actually changed.

Identical values should not trigger an event.

Actual behaviour

A new event is generated during almost every polling cycle, even though the detected value remains unchanged:
 
 
 AlmaLinux 8.10 (Cerulean Leopard)
 
This results in a large number of unnecessary event-log entries and may hide relevant alerts or actual changes.

Reproducibility

The issue is consistently reproducible and currently occurs approximately every five minutes.

Additional information

A screenshot of the Observium event log is attached. It shows the same event being generated repeatedly with identical old and new values.

Could you please check whether this is caused by a comparison, formatting, whitespace, encoding, or database-related issue in the distribution detection logic?

Please let us know which additional diagnostics, poller debug output, database values, or system information you require.

Kind regards,
Alex Faes