Inheritance of Settings

The hierarchical list is not only used to group sensors to organize them, there is also an important aspect involved that we call "inheritance". To ensure administration is quick and easy - especially for large monitoring setups - certain settings are "inherited" from the overlying level. For example, you can change the monitoring interval for all sensors by editing the interval setting of the topmost "root" group.

You can override this inheritance on any level of the hierarchy by setting a different value for a specific group, device or sensor. All objects below will inherit these new settings, not the ones from levels above.

Settings that are inherited among all objects include:

• Monitoring interval.
• Notifications and Triggers.
• Windows authentication settings and WMI compatibility settings (for WMI sensors).
• ESX/ESXi Server authentication settings (for VMware servers)
• 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 a dependency, all associated sensors are paused as well.

There is one exception for devices and sensors: The IP address (or DNS name) of a device and the SNMP and WMI settings are always inherited by sensors and can not be changed on sensor level.

The actual overriding of the parent's settings takes place by deselecting the checkbox "Inherit ... from ..." on the object's settings page. As an example, this screenshot shows Windows authentication settings after deselecting the checkbox:

Default values

For all inheritable settings (except passwords) PRTG already includes a set of default values so you can get started with the software immediately. For example, the following settings will be inherited by all sensors from the "Root" group:

• Default monitoring interval of one minute.
• SNMP version 1 with "public" community string (default values for most devices).
• No entry in object "Schedules and Dependencies", no Windows authentication account.

• A set of schedules (in Setup).
• Various data purging settings.

You may need to change some of these default entries as you become used to the interface, however, these settings should initially suffice for most situations.

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