What’s Nagios?
Nagios is an open source monitoring application for systems and networks.
It can monitor hosts, network services, resources such as processor load; logs, disk usage etc.
You can configure it to send escalating alerts to individuals or groups, and it can alert when selected things go wrong, and again when they’re resolved.
Why World-Text for Monitoring Alerts?
There are many options out there when it comes to selecting an SMS messaging provider. Some are based around the cheapest possible routing along with dubious deliverability or reliability. If your critical application develops a fault you need to be confident the alerts are being delivered by reliable routes!
World-Text have built a network based on reliability. It’s the reason we’re the chosen supplier to SARCALL used by many UK Search and Rescue groups and the 999 Emergency services.
We’ve recently been selected again by SARCALL to deliver SMS Messages as they migrate Mountain Rescue Ireland, PSNI, and An Garda Siochana to the SARCALL system. Once again we’re delivering the messaging behind the search and rescue callout system.
How to Send Notifications via World-Text
There’s very little to actually do to get nagios to send to sms. We’ve put a page together with everything you need Sending SMS from Nagios With World-Text. All that’s required is adding a pager entry for the contact, defining a couple of commands, and placing the perl script we’ve written for you. (Though you will need to update the commands with your World-Text secret API key and account ID).
After it’s in place and tested you can leave it, and hope it’s not triggering to call someone out to a dying server at 4am!
One small note about testing: Please test thoroughly – the thing with Nagios alerts is they don’t happen very often (hopefully), but you need to be sure that the right people and escalations have been put in place.