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Re: Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring

  • From: Patrick Muldoon
  • Date: Thu Sep 06 21:41:41 2007
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On Sep 6, 2007, at 5:39 PM, Seth Mattinen wrote:


matthew zeier wrote:
> Anyone else have any issues, past or present, with this kind of thing?
It takes ~ 7 minutes from the time Nagios sends an email sms to AT&T to the time it hits my phone. I'm using @mobile.mycingular.com because mmode.com stopped working (which results in at least two txt pages vs. the one I was used to).
> Is SMTP to a mobile phone a fundamentally flawed way to do this?
I'm beginning to think it is!


I've never had a problem with Sprint (###@messaging.sprintpcs.com) accepting on their gateway. Although it has always accepted messages, sometimes there was an hour or two delay before the it hit the phone. Also, if you send too many messages too fast it'll stop talking to you for a bit (450 errors) or throttle the SMS delivery. The delay I normally see is under 30 seconds.

If you want to be fancy and take the internet out of the equation, you can use festival with Asterisk to have it call you and speak the messages. (Bonus points for a "press 1 to acknowledge this problem, 2 to escalate, etc." IVR tree.)


I've had issues sometimes with Sprint throttling email -> SMS, especially if the message all look very similar. Also had the stop delivering some emails (our trouble ticket notification system specifically, they would accept the message and effectively bit bucket it).

We've had very good luck using qpage (http://www.qpage.org/) to send messages via TAP. It has worked for years to our Nextel's (NPA-NXX-NOTE), and I now do the same on my Treo from Sprint. Just need to locate a TAP terminal for your carrier. We have nagios (and various other bits of software) submit pages to a qpage daemon, and it handles delivery via dedicated modem, which is nice in case all of your upstreams decided to die @ the exact same time.

-Patrick

--
Patrick Muldoon
Network/Software Engineer
INOC (http://www.inoc.net)
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