Nagios notifications without mail server

[jkinning]

I was asked by my boss if it is possible to have Nagios send notifications in the event our Exchange servers went down. I currently am using our Exchange server's smtp relay to deliver these messages. If I wanted to use Nagios to send email directly how complicated would that be and is it possible. This would include sending notifications to user's phone as well via their cell carriers email address vtext.com for Verizon as an example. Since this is running on Linux I didn't know if using Postfix would work and if anyone is using Postfix or sendmail to dispatch notifications how difficult was it to setup. Should we even worry about that and just keep flowing through Exchange?

Probably several different questions here but looking for guidance and recommendations for Nagios notifications. We have had maybe 2 hiccups in the past 8 years with Exchange but since the boss asked I am trying to figure out how much work and support would be involved to take Exchange out of the equation and if it is even recommended to do so.

[jdalrymple]

Using sendmail works out of the box and is an option.

Using both will require a little bit of customization on your part - namely you'd want to have a specific service that alerts (probably) seperately defined contacts. The important part is changing the notify command to something more appropriate to your needs for those specific checks.

Here is the relevant documentation - dig in and let us know if high-level this doesn't make sense or if you run into any stopping points:

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

[tmcdonald]

Nagios Core uses sendmail by default, however the issue with that is the fact that sendmail, being so easy to set up and use and requiring no authentication, is used by spammers frequently. Relying on sendmail to notify will most likely get blocked by something downstream.

In situations like this I usually like to use a SMS gateway to send text messages somewhat out-of-band in relation to email:

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ith_XI.pdf

And if you want the number@carrier approach, it will still rely on email availability but here it is:

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf