Parenting vs Dependencies

[mark.potter at academy.com]

I know that this has been discussed ad nauseam and I have read quite a bit 
of those discussions this morning and over the preceding weekend. I still 
am at a bit of a loss. I have a pretty firm understanding of parenting and 
dependencies and how they both work. I think I have a good grasp on what 
we need in our environment but I seem to be missing the point in 
explaining this to my boss. So here is an overview of what I have to 
monitor, what my boss is asking, and what I think we need and maybe 
someone can beat some sense into me.

I have a medium sized network (100-200 hosts).
Hosts are in cabinets on site (no off site monitoring yet)
Cabinets are not setup by subnet (I think this is fairly normal)
1 switch per cabinet
Multiple subnets across the farm

The boss and I agree that the switch in each cabinet needs to be part of 
our monitoring setup and be part of some sort of parenting/dependency. 
This is where we cease seeing eye to eye. For the purpose of making this 
easy lets say we are dealing with three subnets and ten cabinets only. 
Here is what the boss wants (at least as far as I can understand): Setup 
three hosts per cabinet to represent the three subnets, that actual IP 
would be the IP of the switch. Parent the hosts in the cabinet to these 
and parent these to the gateways for the subnet. This is, with the 
parameters above, thirty extra hosts, and IMO a management nightmare.

Since the switch is not part of the route my thought is that we parent in 
the normal manner as I understand it, host parents to router, and so on 
and at that point we would make the hosts have a dependency on the switch 
through which their connection passes. The current setup doesn't take into 
account the switches at all but rather is setup to where each host is 
parented to it's gateway IP and that has been working rather well but if a 
switch dies we need to be able to see that via nagios and not have 20 or 
servers and their services going off all at once.. I cannot see why adding 
tens of special hosts for the boss's parenting solution will help anything 
in the long run.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to respond to this as I 
probably haven't explained very well to begin with.

Best Regards,

Mark L. Potter
Systems Engineer
Academy Sports & Outdoors
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