You might be familiar with this situation:

The firewall sitting in front of your server farm fails, taking your public web site, extranet, API server, mail server down with it.

You’re a proactive sysadmin, so you’ve setup Wormly monitoring for all of these servers with alerts configured to hit your cell phone at the first sign of trouble.

As a result, you’re getting streams of alerts all which are telling you the pretty much same thing: Fix that firewall! All of those beeping text messages might help wake you up when this (inevitably) happens at 4am, but for that purpose our phone call alerts are a much better bet.

We’re pleased to announce a new feature designed to prevent such a flood of alerts. You can now configure Host Dependencies to define what other hosts a given host depends on.

From a host’s overview page, click the Host Dependencies link to get started.

You can read the Q&A entry for more details on how this works.

Otherwise, just remember one important tip: Ensure that the shortest downtime triggering alerts on a host is equal to or greater than the testing interval of all hosts it depends on.