In Server Check 1.5.230821 we introduced a new “Time Until Parent Is Stale” setting.
This setting allows you to specify how long a parent monitor’s result is valid for, in the case of any of its child monitors. Before a child monitor is checked, it looks at its parent’s last result, and if this result has gone “stale” (i.e. is older than the number of seconds set in the “Time Until Parent Is Stale” setting), it will tell the parent to run again just before the child is run.
This means that a parent monitor can be set to run very infrequently, for example, every 15 minutes, but if it has any child monitors that run more frequently, the parent monitor might be run much more often so that its result is never “stale” before one of its child monitors runs.
These extra monitor checks still show in the parent as regular checks, and will appear in its charts etc. just as with normal results.
This setting is set to 60 seconds by default, to ensure that a parent monitor result is never too old, but the setting can be disabled entirely by setting “Time Until Parent Is Stale” to 0 (zero). With the setting disabled, any child monitors will be checked as normal, but the parent monitor won’t be re-checked first. The parent monitor will continue to be checked on its own regular cycle, independent of its child monitors.