Hello
As per discussion with Solarwinds representative I was instructed to open discussion here regarding the way Dependancies work.
It seems that dependencies only really are useful for when parent resource is marked specifically as Down, if the parent resource is Unknown then the dependencies feature doesnt work properly.
What I was trying to accomplish with the Solarwinds rep was the following, we monitor processes via APM, we have had instances where if snmpd is down then all alerts fire for that particular host, which is understandable. I was hoping to use dependencies to suppress APM child process monitoring for a host if parent SNMPD is down on the host.
However, it seems that when SNMPD is not running on a monitored host the NMS does not mark it as Down, it marks it as Unknown. I've been explained why this is however, from a monitoring perspective my opinion is that the dependancy should work on this condition as well. Basically if parent process is not up, meaning down or unknown, then fire alert for that and suppress alerting for configured child dependencies.
