nagios and andrews and arnold SMS notification

Andrews and Arnold sells me a VOIP service which also lets me send SMSes over HTTP.

I wanted to make Nagios send out notifications this way, in addition to the existing email-based notification.

First I need a Nagios command definition to send out the notifications:

define command {
  command_name cqx-notify-service-by-sms
  command_line /var/cqxmon/secret-aa-curl 0781234567 "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDISPLAYNAME$ is $SERVICESTATE$"
}

That will invoke my sender script to send a message to phone number 0781234567.

Then we need the sender script. It has my password hardcoded in it (ick! but that could be replaced with a < redirect).

#!/bin/bash

# DO NOT COMMIT THIS TO VERSION CONTROl!

TARGET=$1
shift

TMPFILE=$(mktemp)

echo $@ > $TMPFILE
curl --get --form-string username=0300300300 \
              --form-string password=XYZ123 --form-string destination=$TARGET \
              --form message=\<$TMPFILE \
              http://sms.aa.net.uk/sms.cgi

rm $TMPFILE

The redirect via TMPFILE is because I was having trouble with spaces on the commandline that I couldn't seem to escape around.

Then I need to modify the Nagios contact definition for myself to call the cqx-notify-service-by-sms command in addition to the regular email notifier. In the contact definition for myself:

service_notification_commands cqx-notify-service-by-email, cqx-notify-service-by-sms

That will work for services. For hosts, you'll have to create a cqx-notify-host-by-sms command which does something similar, and add that to the contact notification_commands.

Nagios has a number of other contact fields that could be used to allow the target number to be configured per contact. I'll get round to that at some point; without making those changes, the above will only let you notify a single SMS number.