I'm at a large site, 2500+ employees, 800 monitored hosts (several
thousand farm machines that are only monitored in aggregate) and a few
petabytes of storage.

We feel we need to get every message from our monitoring system
(GroundWork/Nagios at the moment, but we're migrating off of that).  We
used to use a pair modem directly connected to the monitoring system
that could send pages via. TAP/IXO.  As we have migrated to cell phones
instead of pagers, we have found that more and more of them are not
supporting TAP gateways. 

Our current setup varies depending on where it is.  In our India office
we have a server with an SMS modem and kannel.  It is mostly reliable
but we occasionally run into issues where kannel thinks it is working
but loses the ability to talk to the modem.  We haven't found a good way
to catch this happening short of sending heartbeat SMS messages which
would drive whoever gets them crazy.

In the US we have started deploying the iSMS appliance from MultiTech
(formerly known as the SMSFinder).  It is an integrated SMS modem and
web server with an API that you can use to send messages.  Check Linux
Journal, there was a good article there last year on setting one up
complete with a set of scripts that integrate with Nagios for monitoring
and sending messages.

We have found SMS to be very reliable.  As far as we know we haven't
lost any messages.  We do have a handful of devices that we have to
notify via. e-mail, those don't lose messages but we have experienced
significant delays in getting them.

Christofer Hardy wrote:
> So I belong to a mid sized shop, and we have been looking at migrating
> away from a bunch of home grown tools, to other tools.
>
> As part of this discussion, we have been discussing how to deliver the
> alerts, be it Paging via TAP, SMS, carrier pigeon, etc.  We are a high
> uptime shop, so this has reached religious fervor in regards to should
> be stick with Paging, should we move to SMS (Via a SMS gateway).
>
> So I thought I'd ping the group.
>
> What size shop are you? Small, Medium, Large?
> Do you need to get every page?
> Do you use SMS or Paging?
>
> How do you like your solution, and have you found any pitfalls?
>   

-- 
Dan Rich <[email protected]>
          PDI/Dreamworks |  "Step up to red alert!"  "Are you sure, sir?
           (650)562-9018 |   It means changing the bulb in the sign..."

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