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How to alert when your internet connection goes down

If my main internet connection goes down, Orion cannot alert me because it has lost its only connection to the outside world. Does Orion have any kind of built-in capability to dial out via modem and send an email or SMS message out that way? Or does anyone else have a different suggestion?

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brian.austin

One of the Alert Actions is "Dial Paging or SMS service". The feature requires the installation of NotePage, available from SolarWinds site. Going to the site, though, I can't seem to find it.

mark_wiggans

Notepage can be found here-

www.notepage.net/how-to-integrate.htm

mark_wiggans

FYI:

or you could also try this- support.solarwinds.net/.../ProblemDetail.cfm

cchinfosys

It's really surprising to me that a modem-based alert capability isn't native to Orion. Relying on an internet connection or e-mail server to send an alert when one of those very things is what's being monitored is a catch-22.

It's my own fault for assuming this was in the Solar product - I didn't feel like I even needed to test this feature during the evaluation, as it was standard in everything else we looked at, and the "Dial Paging or SMS service" was right there as an alert action.

Maybe version 9?

Clickster

So I tried NotePager Pro, which looked like it was going to be a great solution. But here is the problem - many of the major carriers are shutting their TAP gateways down. T-Mobile and AT&T (which are the two cell services we use) have shut theirs down somewhat recently. So the program works great up to the point that it needs to get ahold of a carrier to send an SMS message. Not NotePager's fault, but it means that none of the SMS solutions will work anymore unless you use one of the cell phone services who haven't shut down their TAPs gateway.

Even if Orion built in a paging option it wouldn't work unless they offered a service that tied to the cell carriers' TAP services.

So here is my quick and dirty work around that I am going to try. I'm going have NotePager dial cell numbers instead of a TAP gateway. So when our internet connection dies, my cell phone gets a call from Orion's modem. Then I just put the phone number in my address book under "INTERNET OUTAGE". I'll set that up for each person I want alerted. I'm sure it won't be quite that simple, but we'll see and I will report back on how it works.