Dependencies overview

By default, WhatsUp Gold polls all devices and active monitors in your device list, unless you manually turn off polling for the system as a whole, or at the device and monitor level. The dependency feature gives you the ability to avoid turning off polling to devices, and instead makes polling dependant on the status of another device's active monitor(s) in your database.

Setting dependencies on one device's active monitors will place another device up or down depending on the type of dependency you configure.

There are two types of dependencies:

Up Dependency can be thought of as describing that something is "behind" something else. The dependant device will only be polled if the device "in front" of it is up.
Down Dependency can be thought of as describing that something is "in front of" something else. The dependant devices in front will not be polled unless the device further down the line is down.

Example

If you make devices behind a router, up dependant on the router's ping active monitor, those devices will not be polled unless that router's ping attempts are successful. Should the router's ping active monitor fail, the devices behind the router will be placed in the unknown state. Without the dependency, the devices behind the router would fire off actions when they become unreachable due to the router's failed ping attempts. With the dependency, only actions on the router will fire.