I guess my point is: yeah, Brandon, Joe, you're right. But, I've built the alerting solution that minimizes the risk I will miss an alert I care about while also minimizing my overall cost and minimizing the complexity of the alerting system. I'm happy to make it better, cheaper, more robust, etc., but I think it's important to balance these things. (I should also note, if anyone had any doubts, that I'm also one of those mom-and-pop ISPs, not Time-Warner or Verizon, so my concept of alerting is a bit different from someone who is trying to keep tabs on 1300 POPs in 40 countries...)
From my point of view, my ideal alerting system is probably something
I think my point's more along the lines of: don't expect to be able to magically hand off a message to a service provider and expect that it will be delivered; they have the same sorts of problems that you do, and the way things are going, they may even be using the same infrastructure that you are. That last bit in particular is worth thinking about. like a smartphone running an app that's connected to the network monitoring system, and can tell me: 1) when it has lost that connection, and 2) whatever problems the network monitoring system chooses to let me know about. The old-timers would recognize this as one form of supervised circuit. I don't really care about the possibility of lost messages so long as I'm aware that I may not be "in touch". I'm perfectly capable of sorting that situation out myself. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.