Dependencies or Parent/Child Relationships

As a long time user of Operations Center (formerly Managed Objects), this is the one thing I miss the most.  I've yet to encounter another solution that had the object relationship capabilities of Manage Objects.  Still, I don't need that level of sophistication at the moment, but any kind of dependency relationship between objects will go a long way to solving one of my biggest problems right now. 

Any update on an ETA on this?  It is one of various missing features that drives my potential clients to alternate solutions and it is very annoying to get a storm of alarms when only one real thing is wrong.

Thanks,
Mark

Please, need ETA.  Thanks.

1 minute ago, LJ Bryson said:

 

Dependencies (manual, if needed) are more important than any automation. ...especially if it means waiting 6 more months while the complex automated dependency mapping is done.

Please, just get us dependencies.

Multiple "parents" is necessary, as well. (e.g., a VM is dependent on the Host on which it runs, the storage on which it resides, storage switches, upstream switches, etc.

Another aspect that is often missed:  If the parent is checked every 60 seconds, and the child goes offline, check the parent-path prior to alerting on the child.  I believe that Nagios works this way, but Zabbix does not (and it is a problem in Zabbix).

Also, with respect to multiple parent dependencies, this is primarily for alerting -- not for monitoring.  In other words, if a router goes down, only alert on the router (not the 300 hosts behind it).  But, still show the 300 hosts as offline/unavailable (perhaps gray, not red?).

Finally, device dependencies alone are not the end -- service dependencies are needed.  ie:

if host X is not pingable, then don't alert on the 30 other checks (including web checks) that are running on that host -- perhaps bundle the dependent alerts in the same 1 email as "affected dependent services."  Likewise, one MySQL goes down with 10 apache instances pointing at it for some web app -- alert on the DB, and include the list of other affected httpds in the same alert (with most critical first).

This would be even more powerful than Nagios.

Please Please give an update and roadmap around this. I really dont care if its automatic or manual work. I NEED to be able to set parent and child relationships on devices ASAP

Agree with LJ, automating the discovery of relationships between groups and devices is less of a priority for me than being able to manually define the relationships.  Automated relationship discovery is fine at the technical layer (device to device) but it won't discover the business level relationships between components, so it's far more important that we can define the business impacting relationships between objects.

It is to read this is on roadmap.  Thank you!  LM is awesome!

Thanks for your feedback and use cases - keep'em coming. Dependencies is currently under active research with a release planned in Q3 of 2018.

What features are being targeted for Q2 2018? Would be good to  some idea so we know if it'll be worth waiting or to build something ourselves now.

@Mosh I had not considered building myself, but as you say that, I think I could put together at least a rudimentary solution using the API.  To be effective, however, it would need to either poll very frequently or be triggered by alerts (and this would still be leaky).  Will have to mock something up as the current situation is unbearable for us, let alone our clients who receive alerts from the system...