In most cases if you can't ping a machine there's no need to warn that the SQL Server on the machine can't be contacted either. But with most monitoring solutions you'll get a barrage of warnings every time there's a single point of failure. Tembria Server Monitor helps you to manage notification floods by letting you define event monitor dependencies. So if you set your SQL Server event monitor to depend on your ping event monitor then it won't notify you if the ping event monitor is in a failed state.

The real power of our monitoring engine comes into play when you do dependency matching by device. Imagine that you have a ping event monitor that regularly checks 50 of your critical machines. Ten of them are running SQL Server and you have a SQL Server event monitor watching those ten machines. If a ping check fails on one of the 10 machines running SQL Server, the SQL Server event monitor won't warn about that one machine but it will check the other nine. It takes a bit of experimentation before you get comfortable with dependency matching but once you do it opens up powerful ways to control your monitoring configuration.