But it appears that the fail condition for "watchdog" is the failure of a pgpool-II instance. In the configuration described in the wiki you would put a pgpool-II instance on each Postgres node, and if one of the pgpool-II instances fails it executes a script (which can create the trigger file to promote the standby to master). However, if the fail condition for watchdog is a failure of the pgpool-II instance what happens if the DBMS has availability issues but the pgpool-II process on that server is ok? The fail condition would never be triggered, right?