[BBLISA] cloud alerting services and/or sms modem?

[K. M. Peterson]

Rob,

Been dealing with this kind of thing for a while.  Two thoughts: 

First, an SMS modem is a good idea since it’s independent of anything other than the GSM (or LTE) carriers’ networks.  You’ve got a backup to your internet connectivity, at the cost of some … cost.

Second, I gave a lightning talk at BBLISA few years ago about using AWS SMS to send ops-related pages.  I’ve found that’s pretty reliable.  Currently I’m also using (of all things) Twitter (DMs to target devices/people that are “following” a source handle, and I use the Twitter "send tweets as SMS" function to ensure that there are two channels to the same device).  

Every once in a while I look to see whether there are better things out there.  I came across Twilio not long ago which looks like an interesting API.  

Hope this helps...

_KMP


> On 29 Jul 16, at 17:30, Rob Taylor <rgt at wi.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Guys. Where I work we have been using nagios for fault monitoring and having it send alerts to our cell phones via the carriers email-to-text gateways.
> We have been having some reliability issues with some carriers, where people haven't been getting our alerts, although the mail gateway accepted the message.
> So, I'm looking at the possibility of making use of an external service, such as opsgenie for alerting, or trying to send alerts via sms modem.
> Does anyone out there in bblisa land have any experience with either? It appears that opsgenie has some acknowledgement and escalation as part of the alerting, so
> if the on-call person doesn't get/respond to the page, it can alert the next person in line, and can integrate with other services like slack.
> 
> Let me know what you think, good or bad? I realize that our internet connection needs to be up for opsgenie to work(which is why I thought of an sms modem as another option), but we monitor external connectivity via another cloud service, so if internet access goes down, we would get alerted on that as well.
> I just need to make sure not all the cloud alerting providers are running in the same AWS AZ, etc.. :-)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> rgt
> 
> Whitehead Network/System Administrator
> 
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