Nagios Support Forum

Has anyone set up a SMS gateway with nagios xi? What type of gateway/device did you use?
Thanks,
Darrell

There are two main paths. One is to hang a cellar device out a window cabled to your network or server. Using software that sends simple AT commands to the modem SMS messages are sent wirelessly. This has the advantage of simplicity and as it has fewer parts it should be less prone to error... However it's week spot(pardon the phun) is cellular reception, it's usually vary bad in an electricity noisy place like a datacenter. As the air and sun/moon now become moving parts the position of nay one of these could cause a service outage, even a plane passing over head could cause you problems.

The higher class method is to use a POTS line with an analog modem, typically connecting at 1200 or 2400 baud. There are many sites that such a setup could connect to and send messages. The down side here is sometimes these sites are firstly difficult to find(Don't ask because I can't help) and secondly may not operate 24x7. The second part is that when you have users of different wireless carriers you will have to configure a different site for each.

Nether of these solutions offers much in the way of stability and after working with this technology you will begin to understand why every blue moon a text message may not be delivered for a few hours or sometimes days.

Other options include simply using email or other internet provided gateway into sending SMS. I'd highly recommend this type of method if internet connectivity is not something you need to monitor.

No, but we have on in the office for testing that we are starting to try this with this week, so hopefully there will be more information from us on this soon.

reason I ask is that our datacenter lost power this past Saturday and I had to spend about half my Saturday getting everything back up and running. I was not notified until my boss was notified at 9 AM after it had been down for two hours. I read this article from Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/usi ... ice-nagios about using SMS with nagios and wondered if I could use it with xi.
Thanks

For this type of detection it's best to have a remote site monitoring the first router or firewall and the Nagios server.

You are not going to get alerted of absolutely every thing with just an SMS modem or the dial in text messaging solution. In fact the situation you described likely took out the monitoring server, correct? Until you have two or more Nagios servers, SMS paging is only for the conveyance of getting messages on your cellphone.

A simple solution would be to get a better internet connection, most ISPs have business plans where they will be calling you when they detect your connection has gone down. I used to support these, this first question is "Do you have power to your equipment." This is the number one reason for a T1 connection to go out of service.

Our data center is at the ISP. The nagios server is in a rack on its own PDU and Battery support. All I want is something using a GSM connection to text me when serious problems occur. We have our production site ( the site that went down) at SmoothStone. The DR site is at Peak 10 datacenter. Thank you for your help but it looks like I am going to have to be creative here.
Thanks

In that case you want to get a POTS line run to your rack. This won't be as cheap as getting a home telephone there will be hidden fees and charges, but your Collocation provider will be vary familiar with the request. While you are at it you should investigate getting a T1/3 or MOE line from your collo to your offices if you don't already, this is an efficient way to get internet to your offices.

Get an external modem and a serial adapter, stay away from the USB veriaty, get an RS232 card if necessary. With this you can do two thing, numeric paging(just dial a long number with ',' to indicate a pause and then hangup) and send text messages via something like Qpage using TAP.