Nagios alerts implemented via VoIP

Nagios Calling

Article from ADMIN 13/2013

By Benjamin Fleckenstein

Out of the box, Nagios can only alert you by email when a service fails, but these email messages can be easily overlooked. A call is more sustainable.

It's difficult to ignore a ringing phone, so it makes sense to teach Nagios how to make phone calls. You can do this with a combination of Nagios [1] and Asterisk [2]. Configuring Asterisk is less than trivial, and setting up a complete PBX just for monitoring is slightly over the top; however, you can sign up for a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) account for not too much money, add a CLI SIP client and a simple shell script, and do the same thing with less overhead (Figure 1).

Figure 1: As you can see, the command that picks up the message – here, an email script – works.

First, the SIP account; you could opt for any VoIP provider. Setting up an account is trivial: Just complete the online form, wait for the confirmation email, and set up your account.

A Matching SIP Client

The process for the CLI SIP client is slightly more complex. Most VoIP clients are designed for the desktop and cannot be scripted at all, or at least not very well. Of the available clients, PJSUA [3] turns out to be the best choice. PJSUA is the PJSIP reference implementation, and it

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