I used a wide range of alerting methods. The most reliable that I have found (at least for Cingular/AT&T phones) has been TAP. Since this way the monitoring server can have its own dedicated modem / phone line (separate from the PBX). Thereby you no longer have to use any of the monitored equipment to relay failures notifications (i.e. chicken and the egg). Because a TAP solution is total separate, one thing we had to do was a daily "test page". Basically every day at noon, a fake check would get tripped on the monitoring system and send an alert to some of the folks that maintained the monitoring server. This way if there was a breakdown in the monitoring system they would (hopefully) notice that they did not get the daily page and fix the problem. Regards, Adam Stasiniewicz -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Kunkel Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 3:46 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring Hello folks, First off, apologies if this is off topic. I'm hoping that system and network monitoring tip are enough of a common issue that this falls under the group's charter. We've traditionally used mobile phone email addresses for system notifications, but over the past 6-12 months, it seems to have become increasingly sketchy. For instance, if an application fails to contact a certain service on a certain server, it sends an email (through it's own SMTP service, to avoid a chicken-and-egg prob if/when our main SMTP service fails) to 1234567890@tmomail.net. (Obviously, that was a fake number.) More and more, I'm getting less and less of these notifications. It seems especially prevalent when MANY things are sent at once; if, for example, a central piece fails, and dependent pieces suddenly fail as well. I try to telnet to mailx.tmomail.net port 25 and get sometimes good, sometimes laggy, and sometimes no response. T-Mobile, support levels all the way up to 3 tell me that it's not them, and everything should work wonderfully. Is SMTP to a mobile phone a fundamentally flawed way to do this? Anyone else have any issues, past or present, with this kind of thing? Thanks, Rick Kunkel