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Consider a situation where an edge router goes down, and from the preceptive perception of NMIS all the nodes behind it appear to be down. By default nmis would send escalation emails for all the nodes behind the edge router. In order to only have NMIS send the escalation email for the edge router and not the nodes behind it, the 'depend' attribute can be set on the nodes behind the edge router. Setting the depend value to the edge router for the nodes behind it will prevent excess escalation emails.
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