[Nagios-users] SMS Alerts, what do you use?

[Mirza Dedic]

Hi,

I currently have Nagios running on a Ubuntu 10.04 VM on our virtual infrastructure, what I would like to do is enable SMS notification for some of the more "critical" notifications. Just wondering what you guys use out there and how you have it setup? Anyone share their experience on getting something reliable to work?

Thanks.

________________________________

The Oppenheimer Group ---- CONFIDENTIAL

This message is for the designated recipient only and may contain privileged, proprietary, or otherwise private information. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the original. Any other use of the email by you is prohibited.

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----

Post by Mirza Dedic
I currently have Nagios running on a Ubuntu 10.04 VM on our virtual
infrastructure, what I would like to do is enable SMS notification for
some of the more "critical" notifications. Just wondering what you
guys use out there and how you have it setup? Anyone share their
experience on getting something reliable to work?

You will get different responses on this...

but using SMS for something that's *more* critical may not be your best
approach, seeing as how SMS is a non-reliable transport with no way to
tell (in most cases) whether the destination addressee received the
message and (in some cases) even whether the network did.

It depends on what your definition of "is", er, I mean "critical" is. :-)

Cheers,
-- jra

[Mirza Dedic]

I want to receive text version of some notifications in place (along with the standard email) for some of our systems; I already have the checks in place but what I want is them to be texted to me and not emailed. Sometimes emails get through the cracks, but I think SMS will work.

Also for a scenario where our email server does not work, say the service stops or the box becomes unresponsive this would be a 2nd way to get alerted regarding the issue.

That is the general idea of what I need SMS or an alternative way to get messages to my mobile device; and with the iPhone there is no custom email filters on messages (such as setting loud noise, etc. unless you jailbreak it and use cydia repo) but such control is there for texts.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:***@baylink.com]
Sent: February/17/2011 8:28 PM
To: Nagios Users List
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] SMS Alerts, what do you use?

----- Original Message -----

Post by Mirza Dedic
I currently have Nagios running on a Ubuntu 10.04 VM on our virtual
infrastructure, what I would like to do is enable SMS notification for
some of the more "critical" notifications. Just wondering what you
guys use out there and how you have it setup? Anyone share their
experience on getting something reliable to work?

You will get different responses on this...

but using SMS for something that's *more* critical may not be your best approach, seeing as how SMS is a non-reliable transport with no way to tell (in most cases) whether the destination addressee received the message and (in some cases) even whether the network did.

It depends on what your definition of "is", er, I mean "critical" is. :-)

Cheers,
-- jra

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE:
Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen.
Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle.
Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-***@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue.
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null



The Oppenheimer Group ---- CONFIDENTIAL

This message is for the designated recipient only and may contain privileged, proprietary, or otherwise private information. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the original. Any other use of the email by you is prohibited.

[Sean McAfee]

Post by Mirza Dedic
Hi,
I currently have Nagios running on a Ubuntu 10.04 VM on our virtual
infrastructure, what I would like to do is enable SMS notification for some of
the more “critical” notifications. Just wondering what you guys use out there
and how you have it setup? Anyone share their experience on getting something
reliable to work?

We use:
- Moxa OnCell G2110 (http://www.moxa.com/product/OnCell_G2100_G2150I.htm)
- SMSTools3 (http://smstools3.kekekasvi.com/)

Previously, we had a Cepag modem, but it locked up pretty frequently.

In about 2 years of having the Moxa, we've never had a missed page, locked up
device, or any other problem (other than PETA spamming the number...)

[Breandan Dezendorf]

Post by Mirza Dedic
I currently have Nagios running on a Ubuntu 10.04 VM on our virtual
infrastructure, what I would like to do is enable SMS notification for some
of the more “critical” notifications. Just wondering what you guys use out
there and how you have it setup? Anyone share their experience on getting
something reliable to work?

We have two front end servers that alternate the notification role.
Using a pair of Nokia GSM mobile phones attached by their USB cables
to the servers for charging and for the data connection. These are
being operated by gnokii-smsd. We insert a notification message into
the database queue via a perl script that is called by the
notification handler.

The only trouble we've had is from before we switched over to
gnokii-smsd, and were just using gnokii. If two notifications came in
at *just* the right time, the phone's USB port would hang attached to
a zombie process, and we'd have to reboot the server. So, once or
twice a month we'd have to reboot one of the servers. gnokii-smsd
solves that problem by queuing outgoing messages in a database.

Personally, I find that SMS is about as reliable as email for timely
notification. However, we also offer jabber notifications, and I'm
working on being able to hit analog/celluar pagers from Nagios.