SMS Notifications for Nagios

I use Nagios for monitoring. Up to recently I used a regular modem to send sms text messages to various people when systems are going wrong. The way this works is by using smsclient which dials up to a TAP server. [TAP] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telelocator_Alphanumeric_Protocol) is a fairly archaic way of sending messages. It’s been fairly reliable however it has two major drawbacks, sending takes along time and it’s limited to 160 characters. As far as I can tell it will not do long text messages. Which are really just multiple short message combined together in a special way.

I wanted a better way! Something that sounded nice was using the mobile network to send messages, that way I could bypass most of the internal infrastructure and take the notifying system as out of band as possible. After a good bit of research I finally settled on a Masetro 100 from RF Solutions. It also turns out that smstools can use it out of the box. I’m so pleased!