North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Postmaster @ vtext.com (or what are best practice to send SMS these days)

  • From: Patrick Shoemaker
  • Date: Wed Apr 16 13:47:01 2008

My solution is to use a modem / POTS line hanging off the nagios box along with the qpage daemon to send alerts out through a TAP gateway. If you need the specs and 800 number for Verizon's TAP gateway I can send it offlist.

http://www.dynowski.com/blog/2006/05/19/using-nagios-with-quickpage-a-sms-tap-gateway/

This is important not only to avoid the inconsistency of the vtext email-sms gateway but to get an alert out in case of a major network disruption that breaks email functionality.

Patrick Shoemaker
President, Vector Data Systems LLC
[email protected]
office: (301) 358-1690 x36
mobile: (410) 991-5791
http://www.vectordatasystems.com


David Ulevitch wrote:

We've noticed that [email protected] is no longer a very reliable form of delivery for alerts from Nagios, et al. It seems as our volume of alerts has risen, our delivery rate has dropped precipitously.

We don't expect much trying to actually reach a postmaster for vtext.com so I thought the better question would be to ask what the current best practice is to get SMS alerts out?

Back in the day, I remember a company I worked for had something called a TAP gateway. Is that still a good route? I've also been told to check out an SMS gateway/api service called clickatell.com -- anyone using them to delivering timely notifications?

Is the best thing to do to try and get a programmable cellphone in a
datacenter?

What else are operators doing to get the pages out when things go wonky?

-David