Nagios and free SMS alerts

Every professional administrator need to be informed about each failure on his servers. Imagine that you are in the cinema, in the shop or for example sleeping. Suddenly one of your machines takes very hight load. Problem requires your intervention… but you do not know about it.

Since now it is going to change…

Components:

- 1 fresh Nagios (must be configured),
- 1 “free Google sms gateway” script from this site,
- 10 minutes of free time
- 1 beer (or cup of good coffee ).

Preparation:

1. Connect Google Calendar with your mobile phone.

For this log in into Google Calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/ and go to the

Settings -> Calendar Settings

option. Make sure that you had configured your telephone number on the Mobile Setup tab. Next go to Calendars tab and make sure that in the Notifications settings you set “By default, remind me via SMS 1 minute before each event”.

2. Download, install and configure script to send SMS using Google Calendar.

cd /usr/bin/
wget http://artursmolarek.com/download/sendsms
chmod +x sendsms

Now you must edit downloaded script and change setting to your GMail account:

nano sendsms

login = 'username@gmail.com'
password = 'your_password'

Install python libraries which have been used in the script:

easy_install elementtree
easy_install gdata

Send test SMS to your phone:

sendsms @company test

3. Edit your Nagios configuration files:

- contacts.cfg should looks like:

service_notification_options w,u,c,r
host_notification_options d,u,r
service_notification_commands notify-service-by-email,notify-service-by-sms
host_notification_commands notify-host-by-email,notify-host-by-sms

- in the commands.cfg add:

# 'notify-host-by-sms' command definition
    define command{
    command_name notify-host-by-sms
    command_line sendsms "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$: $HOSTNAME$ - $HOSTSTATE$"
}

# 'notify-service-by-sms' command definition
    define command{
    command_name notify-service-by-sms
    command_line sendsms "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ - $SERVICESTATE$"
}

4. Restart Nagios:

/etc/init.d/nagios restart

Now you can sleep peacefully. Every time Nagios will have problems, you receive SMS direct to your Phone. For free