Ground Control to Major Tom?

March 16, 2012 8:33 AM

Is there a keep alive / dead man's email service?

We have a piece of equipment on a UPS capable of sending emails when there is a power outage. Which is kind of useless... when the entire building loses power. One solution is to buy a cellular hotspot router, and hook it up to a UPS as well.

The dual of that would be to have it send an email every 15m, and for the service to report the lack of an email. Say we are willing to have a few false alarms [because the SMTP server burps or something], is there an easy way to set this up? Or a service that will do it?

This is for equipment, not like a senior citizen monitor or something. Thanks!

posted by gensubuser to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Is it essential that you use email, rather than simple IP connectivity, as the thing that triggers the alarm? I mean, if the equipment can send email, that probably means it has a pingable IP address, and there are lots of tools (e.g., WhatsUp Gold) that can ping a device periodically and alarm when the device becomes unpingable.
posted by bac at 8:52 AM on March 16, 2012

A service like servermojo might be a decent alternative as well. Or if you have an alternate site with internet capability, WhatsUp is a very popular monitoring solution. For most things, simple IP monitoring is sufficient. If you need to monitor services however it's more into the realm of SNMP monitoring, which is safer to do on site.
posted by samsara at 9:10 AM on March 16, 2012

The simplest and best way is to use a modem hooked up to a landline.
posted by rhizome at 11:40 AM on March 16, 2012

Servermojo is close, but kind of expensive. Cellular data plans just aren't made for emergency-use, but it looks like there is some SMS-alert hardware out there...
posted by gensubuser at 2:19 PM on March 16, 2012

You want Nagios, I think.
posted by axiom at 6:03 PM on March 16, 2012