I'm interested in how people manage remote alerting and what people see as the future in that area. Some key things that I'd like to understand:

1. Are pagers still in wide use?
2. Is SMS the direction to look to for alerting needs? 
3. Are there other alternatives that you're exploring/using?

From the standpoint of industry focus I'm interested also in hearing from people who consider themselves consultants, installers or MSPs.  How do you use remote alerts and how do you set things up with your customers?  For example:

1. Do you plant software inside the client's firewall and have that software alert you in case of failure?
2. Do you keep software on your site and VPN into the client site?
3. Are there any alternatives you're exploring?

I'd like to hear your stories.

Cheers!

pete.;1

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Peter H. Jenney

Product Management 
Ipswitch
10 Maguire Rd.
Lexington, MA 02421

We still have pagers but not many. Currently other than that it is either email or cell phones. Largest thing here is that some providers charge 10 cents per message so sending false messages has become a big issue. We have email alerts only during working hours and cell phone / pager alerts at nights and on the weekends. !! Would be nice to have a calendar to schedule vacations, trips, meeting and such for the people that are assigned to these alerts. !! #WHY# Currently we are in the process of a national rollup of server rooms into our data center so as we supply different lines of business with the results of our tools editing these parameters will become a big issue.

Currently we are on the same backbone so VPN is not an issue. The only issue is the secondary alert mechanism that let's us know the data center has lost connection to the network. In this case we dial another region and bounce an SMTP alert to our email, pagers and cell phones.

We currently use a combination of Blackberry devices and pagers. Both devices have individual email addresses. Software is included with the Blackberry that forwards your email to the Blackberry. Most of us forward either a portion (including Whatsup email) or all email to the Blackberry. I use email messages for all Whatsup alerts, sending email to Exchange accounts and to pager email addresses (for non-blackberry devices). The Blackberry devices can be used for email or as a regular numeric pager. When critical devices (those that would stop the flow of email) go down, I use an analog modem connected to the Whatsup server to send coded numeric pages that indicate which device is down.

Norm

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."