I have been asked by someone how to do phone call notification of critical alerts in PRTG monitoring system. Advantage of phone call notification against Email or SMS is that it can wake up sleeping administrator in night when he has support service and critical alert appears in central monitoring system.
My conceptual answer was ... use PRTG API to monitor alerts and make a phone call when critical alerts exist.
New generation of admins doesn't have problem with APIs but don't know how to dial voice call. That's because they are IP based generation and don't have experience with modems we played extensively back in 80's and 90's ;-)
At the end I promised them to prepare embedded system integrated with PRTG over API and dialing phone configured number in case of critical alerts.
Here is the picture of hardware prototype leveraging soekris computing platform running FreeBSD OS in RAM disk and making phone calls via RS-232 GSM modem.
Here are relevant blog posts describing some technical details little bit deeper
My conceptual answer was ... use PRTG API to monitor alerts and make a phone call when critical alerts exist.
New generation of admins doesn't have problem with APIs but don't know how to dial voice call. That's because they are IP based generation and don't have experience with modems we played extensively back in 80's and 90's ;-)
At the end I promised them to prepare embedded system integrated with PRTG over API and dialing phone configured number in case of critical alerts.
Here is the picture of hardware prototype leveraging soekris computing platform running FreeBSD OS in RAM disk and making phone calls via RS-232 GSM modem.
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| Soekris computing platform and RS-232 GSM modem. |
2 comments:
Fortunately for those who do not want to play with HW modem is there a possibility to call over SIP provider using some OpenSource project like Asterisk, jssip, pjsip,... :)
P.
Hi Pavel. First of all thanks for reading my blog post and leaving the comment ;-) I was also thinking about SIP during design phase but SIP will not help me in situation when I have problem with my internet connectivity. SIP is significantly more complex then ATD on industrial GSM modem. Industrial GSM modem is very low cost nowadays. Brand new modem cost approximately 100 EUR and I bought used one on Aukro (local Ebay) for 20 EUR. I can connect it via standard serial RS-232 port and call over GSM network. That means I have out-of-band network avoiding dependency on ethernet network and internet. However, as always ... your millage may vary :-)
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