Re: P2 depends on P1. "Start P1" will "Start P2"? Wrong?

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Service dependencies is described here, 
http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html#SERVICE-DEPENDENCIES. 
Dependencies in Monit goes both ways, in a way and was created for a more 
tightly coupled dependency chain. The primary example which dependencies was 
created for is a setup like, a database server (P1 in your example) and an 
application server with a connection pool to the database server (P2). Now if 
the database server goes down, open (TCP) connections in the app-server’s 
connection pool will no longer work when the database server is started again, 
so the app-server needs to be restarted as well. 10 years ago this would often 
be necessary. Today, a modern connection pool might/should be able to recover a 
database restart and restarting the app-server and connection pool is overkill. 

A simpler dependency version is wanted and on our roadmap with explicit “is 
dependent by” or “depends on” relations which just describes the start order 
_and_ a check to see if dependent services are running and no attempt to 
restart "is dependent" by services. 

Ps. Apropos start order, if no dependencies are used, services will be started 
in the order they are listed in the .monitrc file. 


> On 28 Feb 2015, at 02:37, Jack Martin <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> My question is about startup and dependencies. Suppose P2 depends on P1. It 
> makes sense that if you use "monit start P2", then monit should start P1 
> before it starts P2. However, running "monit start P1" will *also* cause P2 
> to be started despite P2 not being a dependency of P1. This seems like an 
> error. Is there any chance that behavior could be changed?
> 
> This interferes with some production deployment code, and results in our 
> needing to unmonitor a related group of processes before manually starting 
> processes since starting P1 will start P2 (unintentionally).
> 
> Thanks,
> Jack