Inheritance is defined by how many attributes are applied to a device at different points in the device hierarchy.
The following diagram shows an example of how and where configuration properties can be set throughout the device class tree.
In this example, you can see that the default properties can be set at the highest level (/). However, as you travel further down the hierarchy, you see that you can override any of the configuration properties set at the root level.
The next two lines show how the device tree further defines properties for Linux servers. If you wanted, for example, to set up and use SNMP monitoring for all Linux servers (inclusive of) build.zenoss.loc, you could change these properties at the /Server/Linux level.
Further, if you wanted to change how you collect information for remote Linux servers, you could create a sub-group in /Server/Linux called /Server/Linux/Remote, setting these servers to use SSH monitoring and changing the associated properties for that sub-group.
Also within the /Server group you could create another sub-group for Windows servers that changes the configuration properties specifically for WMI monitoring.
All of these configuration properties and groupings co-exist, with any changes made lower in the hierarchy taking priority.
