Service Dependency Design

[Marty]

I am having trouble understanding the design of service dependencies 
within Nagios.  I thought they could be set up to operate like host 
dependencies.  For example:

   Service_A is the master service.

   Service_B depends on Service_A.

   If Service_B changes state (say OK to CRITICAL) as a result of its
   dependency on Service_A, nagios would immediatly follow up with a check
   of Service_A before sending notifications about B.

That is how host dependencies work -- you receive a a single alert saying 
that the router is down rather than about all 50 hosts behind the router.
However this is not true about service dependencies.

Within the nagios code (checks.c) it appears that if a service changes 
state, nagios follows up with a host check, but not a service dependency 
check.  Nagios only takes the last state of the master service.  If the 
master service went critical immediately following its check and took down 
dependent services, notifications could be sent out about all dependent 
services before nagios gets back to checking the master service again.**

I want to do the same with service dependencies.  Rather than receiving 
many alerts about various dependent services, I would like nagios to 
notify me that the master service is down.

I want to thank nagios developers for all your hard work.  I would like to 
contribute back to the group by attempting to add master service checks 
immediately following state changes of dependent services, however I am 
likely unaware of all the issues surrounding the design implementation of 
dependent service checks.

Is there a particular developer I could contact or a discussion thread 
about service dependencies and how/why they were implemented as they are 
in the source?

Thank you agan for any help you can provide.

Regards,
Marty Combs



** I can provide a more detailed description of this situation we are 
having if anyone needs me to.

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