On 2010-10-28 at 11:31 -0600, 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?
Large. *Someone* needs to get every page, although alerts can be silenced to inhibit pages. Both. If you design in a dependency on one system, you're in trouble. Redundant paths, tried in parallel, and a system which waits for a response and, if no response is received, falls back to try another person works. Social pressure for "why is X falling through to me?" within a team keeps people honest. The alerting system in use here (I'm just a user, I didn't design/deploy it) lets alerts also go to, eg, IRC. Combined with an irssi plugin I wrote, to invoke notify-send(1), I get desktop bubble notifications of alerts when I'm at my desk. Alternatives include IM messages; given a phone with an IM client, that can work well, racing against SMS. There are various other options in the system, but they're not mine to talk about. Generally, design to avoid single points of failure, whether computer, link or human. -Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
