[Gllug] Pagers

[Dean Wilson]

---- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Dye" <jonathan.dye at automationpartnership.com>
> > very true
> > for important server alerts you should probably go for pager or have

> My experience with pagers is that if you happen to be out of reception
when
> the message is sent then you never get it as there is no notification
back
> to the sender as to whether you recieved it or not.

In my current place of emplyment we offer an alerting service to the
customers when certain events happen (We do site and performance
monitoring) and after a fair bit of digging around we came up with some
annoying bits of trivia, when things work they work fine and pretty quick
but when they play up alerts go missing for hours. Also proving that the
support crew actually got an alert and didn't just ignore for one more
round is a right pain.

Annoying facts
SMS can take days
No one wants to carry a phone and a pager.
Pages are not guarenteed. We were pretty much unable to get a service
contract that said "In ten minutes you WILL have a page". Its a best effort
thing.
SNPP (Simple network Paging Protocol) comes in three main flavours (Last
time i looked) and i think it was level three that dealt with resends,
queing and some basic quality of service. Most networks in the UK don't
support anywhere near this level so its a fire and forget.

In the end we wrote the above facts and some purty wording in to our own
SLA's and learned to deal with it. The method we use for critical alerts
(Such as aircon failure or no coke in the fridge) is a phone call that has
to be acknowledged otherwise it phones back a number of times and then
phones your boss. Its pretty effective but you need BT to not screw up the
lines. Something i considered but never got around to is a nokia mobile
PCMCIA card in a laptop. THat way if you lose all power and the phone
system then it can still call out due to laptop battery and the phonecard.

And the Net::SNPP module for Perl is shit; it doesn't even have a method
for passing in user names and passwords[0]

Hope this ramble helps.
  Dean
[0] No i've not offered a patch. Bad Dean.
--
Profanity is the one language all programmers understand
--- Anon


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