Monitoring websites, among other things is useless if you don’t know that there is any kind of a problem with whatever you are monitoring.
Most monitoring services, and for that matter most monitoring software, will let you choose how you receive messages about devices having problems.
For instance, at microNOC we offer the option of monitoring by text message (or SMS as it’s more correctly known) or email. (And we are looking at other systems, such as Yammer or Twitter as well.)
So which should you choose?
Email messaging is great, if you make sure that whatever email address that we send the alert to is one that isn’t associated with the device that might have the problem. For instance, if we’re monitoring your mail server, you probably don’t want to have alerts sent to an account on that mail server. Common sense really. And if getting notified immediately of the problem is something that is important (which is probably why you are monitoring in the first place….) then you need to make sure that the email we are sending the message to is one that gets to you immediately during the periods that you want to be notified. For instance, if you want to make sure that you get alerts on your phone in the middle of the night, you need to make sure that your email address goes directly to your phone, using a push technology.
A better method for most people is to send alerts to your phone via SMS or text message. This system sends a brief (about 140 character) message to your phone directly from our monitoring servers. It’s really only dependent on the phone network being online. Overall it’s a great method if you want to get your alerts via your phone, no matter where in the world you are located.
One big benefit of getting alerts via SMS is that your phone actually will make a noise to alert you. I know that some phones do with incoming email, but I know that I turn that off right away - too many emails - and only leave alert sounds on for SMS messages.
No a problem with both of these methods is that they are best effort methods for messaging. There is no guarantee for the amount of time that a message takes to get to you, for either email or SMS. But in general SMS is a quicker method and isn’t dependent on your phone and mail service supporting push communications.
We actually recommend getting messages sent via both methods, so that you can see via email (especially useful sitting at your desk) or SMS (when on the road or not at your computer) that there is a problem.
Which ever method that you choose to use (or don’t choose, use both), the most important thing is that you are monitoring the systems that you and your business depend on.
