Dependencies or Parent/Child Relationships

So this set of datasources doesn't directly know anything about connections.

It requires the user to set the depends_on property.

If A is in Alert, and B depends on A (via the property), then B and all its interfaces will be in SDT.

This is awesome. Do these datasources allow a Service to be a parent for bunch of dependent devices and vice versa? 

Can we set the depends_on property at the group level?

AS it's currently written, it doesn't support Services as either the dependent or primary. (It could be made to support that, with some extra scripting. Let me know if that's important.)

And yes, you can set the depends_on property at the group level (and then override on devices, if needed.)

This is great!  I'm testing this now in our environment. 

One thing that would be useful for us is allowing us to suppress alerts when DNS resolution is failing to a particular device.  For example, we have a tunnel between two locations, and several monitors on the other side of the DNS server.  If DNS resolution breaks, all monitors using hostnames are going to break.  It would be nice to only be alerted once for the DNS problem, not the individual devices that are having DNS problems.

Edit: Oh shoot i just noticed this doesn't support services currently.  That is mostly what we'd use this for. Our use-case is that we have a large number of URL monitors that are monitoring from the location of users, to systems running the cloud.  When we have a DNS problem, we get hundreds of alerts all at once for the same issue, which is obviously not ideal.  We would definitely need this to support service monitors.

OK, I can extend this to support Services... I've got a few other things I'm in the middle of, so it may be a week or two...

Thank you sir, that would help us out tremendously.

+ 1 for adding services support from me as well

Hmm... This doesn't seem to be working for me. It appears to be; up until the point an alert fires. 

I've set a group that has the depends_on property set. Then have placed all relevant devices into said group (same upstream device). Everything appears to be working as expected. I see all devices in the group have inherited the depends_on property. And when I look at the primary device, it has indeed got the is_primary_device = true property set. However, when I kick off a test alert for PingLossPercent on the primary device, none of the dependent devices are put into SDT.

Upon investigation I found that the is_primary_device property was removed from the primary device. And, with the test alert still active, when I poll now from one of the dependent devices, I see it get recreated briefly but then disappear again. Once the alert clears, I am able to poll now from a dependent device and see the is_primary_device property get recreated.

???

Yep - I made a mistake in the device filtering, so it was only finding dependents that had the depends_on set directly on the device, not those that were inheriting it via groups (although I was sure I tested that...)

Anyway, I've found the error, and fixed it, and will publish tomorrow after a bit more testing.

Sorry about that..

@Steve Francis thank you sir! Please do let us know when the update has been published. :)/emoticons/smile@2x.png 2x" title=":)" width="20">