Hello, I have tried o play a bit with the service dependencies list and defined the following: define servicedependency{ dependent_host_name WS1 dependent_service_description CPU usage,Disk I/O usage,Individual CPU core usage,Memory usage host_name WS1 service_description PING execution_failure_criteria w,u,c notification_failure_criteria w,u,c } So when the host WS1 is not reachable via PING, other services should not be checked or notified. Works fine. Now I did the following using hostgroups define servicedependency{ dependent_hostgroup_name workstations dependent_service_description CPU usage,Disk I/O usage,Individual CPU core usage,Memory usage host_name workstations service_description PING execution_failure_criteria w,u,c notification_failure_criteria w,u,c } And it does what I expect it to do, but not what's needed: make each service on any of the workstations group dependent by any PING service on any host in the group. My question is: is there any way to use variables in such a way that the other services on a host are dependent only on the PING on the same host?: In a large environment, using the first example and copy paste is really time consuming. Thanks!