[99133] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Knoll \(TTNET\))
Thu Sep  6 18:40:50 2007
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 16:36:11 -0500
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0709061339020.28859-100000@samwise.w-link.net>
From: "Brian Knoll \(TTNET\)" <Brian.Knoll@tradingtechnologies.com>
To: "Rick Kunkel" <kunkel@w-link.net>, <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Is it flawed?  It depends on your business requirements.  If seconds,
milliseconds, or even microseconds matter to your mission critical apps
(think real-time trading networks) then you would want a 24x7 staffed
NOC using an enterpise monitoring system - something like Openview.  You
wouldn't want to rely on anything that sends emails. =20
Brian Knoll
-----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