what do you use for pager?

[David Rudder]

I work with a lot of different ways of contacting people, and they all 
have their ups and downs.  My favorite is to have Nagios call me with 
the alert read via text-to-speech.  I have it call my cell, which I 
sleep with, so it wakes me up, but not the wife and kids.  I can then 
respond with the phone keypad.  The downside is that the responses are 
simple "acknowledge" or "pass", and I can't annotate the alert. 

My second favorite is pagers.  USA Mobility sells very nice pagers, with 
a full qwerty keyboard. The Motorola pagers are very nice.    Responding 
is super-simple, since you can just select the response from a 
drop-down, and you can add comments very easily.  But, I've seen 
problems when you're in an area with sketchy coverage.  The pager will 
work fine, until the battery gets low, then it won't have the power to 
get a signal.  But it'll have enough power to service the "normal" case, 
so it doesn't complain.  Most of the time, I'm in downtown Denver, so 
it's not a problem, but other people I work with are outside Omaha, and 
they run into this problem maybe 3 or 4 times a year.  It's frustrating 
enough that I need to have a back-up.

Email and SMS are just too high volume for me.  I definitely use both, 
but I only pay attention to them when I'm awake.  Otherwise, I'll be 
woke up 12 times a night to have someone tell me my loan has been 
approved (or worse, but this is a family-oriented mailing list).

I also *LOVE* IM.  I have a super-secret GMail account that only Nagios 
knows about.  I have my Blackberry wake me when it gets a Google Talk 
message on that account.  But, my software can't track which alert 
you're responding to when using IM, so you have to type in the alert ID, 
which in my case is a 7 digit number.  That's pretty tedious at 2AM.  
True SMS requires that, too, but not if you're just using an 
SMS-to-email gateway. 

I read your email yesterday, but I don't have much to add re: 
smartphones.  I love my crackberry.  The Treo is very nice.  The Windows 
Mobile stuff is also very nice.  *shrug*  If I can get phone calls, 
email, Google Talk, SSH and play a few dumb games while waiting for the 
bus, I'm happy.  My 5 year old Blackberry can do that. 

-Dave

Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> (I wrote a long email yesterday but no response, so will ask differently:)
>
> What type of device and SMS network do you use for the target of your 
> nagios "pager"?
>
> Is it easy to read and managed hundreds of SMS/phone messages?
>
> How reliable is your SMS network?
>
> And can you easily respond or resolve problem using the same device?
>
>   Jeremy C. Reed
>
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