It seems to be pretty well documented that there are issues with ve.direct devices shuffling around device IDs in a system. This is an extreme nuisance for multiple reasons. Firstly, your device history in the GX and VRM essentially get lost. Secondly, if you have a well defined Advanced view in VRM with many widgets, these have to be redone every time the device IDs get shuffled which is a considerable pain due to the interface. While a pretty interface, it is NOT at all an enjoyable process to arrange your widgets in VRM.
I have had this happen twice now in my system in the last 3 days and it is very frustrating and really breaks your historical data used for trending and analysis.
It seems that currently, devices get tracked by their ve.direct device id (288+). This is a transient value that appears to get assigned to devices when they are connected/on power up (or if a random reshuffle occurs?) and is simple a bus communication port. Given that every device has a unique serial number (and likely other under the hood identifiers as well) why isn't data logged against that vs against the device ID which seems to change randomly without reason. This would represent a much more "stable" view into your data and allow me to trust the long term trends much more.
Thanks!