Introduction to PRTG 7 Part 5: The “Inheritance” Concept
This another posting of my series of introductory blog posts about our new software “PRTG Network Monitor 7” which is currently undergoing a public beta test.
The hierarchical list of sensors is not only used to group sensors to organize them, there is also an important aspect involved that we call “Inheritance”.
To keep administration quick and easy – especially for large monitoring setups - certain settings are “inherited” from the top level downward. For example you can change the monitoring interval for all sensors by just editing the interval setting of the topmost “root” group.
The inheritance can be overridden on any level of the hierarchy by setting a different value for a specific group/device/sensor. Then - again - all objects below the object that has overridden settings will inherit these settings, and not the ones from the levels above.
Settings that are inherited include the following:
- Monitoring interval
- Notifications
- Windows authentication settings (e.g. for WMI sensors)
- SNMP authentication settings and compatibility settings
- Channel and unit configuration
- User access rights
- Paused Status: if an object is paused by the user, by a schedule or by dependency all associated sensors are paused, too
The overriding takes place by selecting the appropiate radio buttons on the settings page of an object.