SMS notification limiting.?

[chayanisa]

Hi Guys,

Zabbix supports the sending of SMS messages using a serial GSM modem connected to Zabbix server's serial port

.

Therefore i would like to know, if my network down. How many sms can send alert notifications in the same time ?
100 sms ?
1000 sms ?
Are they some limitation ?
I can not find this infomation.

thanks

[Atsushi]

Check the manual. If the modem that supports SMS is not connected, as described in the error message, SMS cannot be used.

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/4.0/manual/config/notifications/media/sms

If you do not have a modem, consider using another medium, such as Email, to notify you.

[chayanisa]

Hi Atsushi, thanks for your answer.

Yes, I have read the manual , however i can not find the answer!!
Imaging that in the case of my server is down or The whole Network in country-branch is down.
And there are many items/hosts on that sever/ Branches. Therefore i would like to know, how many sms can send alert to me in the same time. ?

by the way I already have notifications email,although it works well. But we could not checking email every hours .
This is the reasons why i am looking for the other solution.

I am also considering about Mattermost and Telegram too.
Do you have any suggestion for me?

thanks in advance

[Atsushi]

If you do not have a modem, you will not be able to use the SMS features that Zabbix provides by default. Consider how to use a custom script to send a message to the messaging system you want to use.

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/config/notifications/media/script

By registering multiple media for the user, you can send multiple email notifications and other notifications.

If you are using Zabbix 4.4 or later, several notification methods will be available using Webhooks. If you have newly installed Zabbix 4.4.6, you will find settings for Pushover, Mattermost, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Slack, and Discord. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, you will be able to download and use the configuration from Zabbix's Git repository. The usage is described on Git.

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/config/notifications/media

https://git.zabbix.com/projects/ZBX/repos/zabbix/browse/templates/media

[tim.mooney]

I think the reason why the Zabbix docs don't answer your question specifically is that the answer is "It depends". It depends on the particular SMS device you're using and how it's connected to your server. Note that serial modems aren't the *only* option, they're just the current *built-in* option.

As you've already realized, using a service like PagerDuty or Opsgenie only works if your monitoring system can contact that service. In the event of a network partition or even just some critical piece of infrastructure being down, if your Zabbix server is isolated, it may not be able to deliver alerts via these external services.

When my site deployed Zabbix, we attached a USB modem to our Zabbix server and hooked it up to a traditional phone line (not VoIP). Zabbix didn't have built-in support for this, but you can define your own media types which use external tools and programs, so we used sendpage (https://www.sendpage.org/README.txt) to send a (very short) message via the TAP protocol directly. This alert method was only used in very specific circumstances, though, such as core network dependencies being offline, DNS being nonfunctional, our email gateway being unreachable, etc.

This TAP-via-modem method doesn't work anymore, though, because most cell phone carriers have phased out their TAP gateways.

Just keep in mind that because you can define your own media types, you're not limited to the built-in SMS option. If you can make your SMS device work reliably using external tools, chances are good you use that device with a custom media type for alerting.

All of this flexibility means it's not really possible to give a precise answer for the "how many" question, though.