AdvisorICMP is a terrible way for the Collector to determine “Host Dead” status. Better would be if any DataSource is able to collect data from it. If data can be collected, the host isn’t dead.
That actually is close to how it works now. ICMP does reset the idleInterval datapoint (or whatever the internal flag is), which is what determines host down status. However, it’s not the only thing. Any datasource that can be trusted to actually get a reply from a device should reset the idleInterval datapoint. This includes any SNMP datasources, website/http datasources, etc. It does not include scripted datasources. The thinking there is that a scripted datasource might be contacting a 3rd party system to collect data and not actually getting an actual response from the device itself. So, anything that is guaranteed to return data from the device itself should reset the idle interval counter.
The bigger feature request here is that customers need a way to modify/override the built in criteria for considering a device down. For some people, pingability is enough. For others, it needs to be pingable and responding to some other query. The customers need the ability to determine (on the device, group, and global levels) what constitutes a device being down. For example, i would need to be able to say that ping has to be up, but also x/y of these other datasources must also be returning data.
