Clever nagios alert methods

Question

We use Nagios, and I get SMSs when something happens. Lots of other sysadmins also get texts. However is there any clever / cool other ways people have gotten nagios alerts?

Answer 1

Using XMPP / Jabber to send Instant Messages is pretty popular. Here is a short tutorial on how to set this up.

Answer 2

We show nagios alerts on our IRC channel using the NagiosIRC bot

Answer 3

We are using twitter, google chat, mail, and the best thing is the nagios firefox plugin

there are also hardware option like the nagios nabaztag mod

Answer 4

I know of people using push notifications with Growl/Prowl on the iPhone.

Answer 5

You might want to take a look at a project that we're working on called PagerDuty. It sends phone call and SMS alerts in response to incoming email. Quite a few of our customers use us with Nagios.

We've got some other fun features too: automatic escalation (your co-worker gets the call if you're unable to pick up) and on-call rotations (automatically route calls to your phone this week, and to your co-worker next week).

We're always looking to add more features to PagerDuty, so please let us know what you think!

Answer 6

Big red police light, SMS, traditional email, jabber message and a phone call, all depending on SLA on each server. Silent phone calls from a machine at 3am however is never a good thing... Especially when the machine has the audacity to come out of that state as soon as you drag your arse out of bed.

Answer 7

I prefer an actual pager over SMS. It is decidedly uncool, but they are more reliable and have wider coverage areas where I live. Also, POTS lines don't go offline as often as internet lines.