SCOM > Text Alerts

Dashboard Server
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Hi

Currently we use an email to text service to send out critical alerts to on call engineers – however, this is prone to Exchange delays or failures and often slow

We would like to use a text solution that does not rely on Exchange to pass the email first – not least because if Exchange were to fail we can not text the Exchange team to tell them!

I was wondering what solutions you guys use for this if you could advise?

We are considering when we move to SCOM 2019 using the inbuilt function to text out using a server and a sim – has anyone used this? is it reliable?

We are quite a large company and send around 2k texts a month – but other parts of the business total 10k texts so a platform that we can all move to and share would be ideal.

1 Like
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On SCOM 2016 we are testing a paging service that has a webhook. The testing is going very well and the powershell to control it was not too hard to set up. The plus of it is that teams can go in and configure their own notification and escalation paths. This is great because then only the on call people get the pages and if you are not on call you do not need to get the page. The service we are looking at has an acknowledgement feature that it keeps escalating up the chain until someone acknowledges the alert. Sometimes it is good to look at what does a 3rd party add on buy me vs what MS provides out of the box.

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We're using a solution form Sysman (https://www.sysman.no/).

It’s a software that works together with a hardware GSM modem. That is connected through USB2LAN to the SCOM server that runs on a VM.

It’s running reliable for 8 years in row now. - Simple, but good.

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There are two wqys. Either via batch file which is called in the “Channel” or via SMTP.

The vm on which the sysman-server-component is installed also has a SMTP Server.

That also works very nicely.

Let me know if you need more information about our setup.

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You do need to be careful when using a channel for sending out the alerts if you send too many at a time it will not be able to function and will drop alerts.

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We also use SysMan server with a physical GSM-SMS-modem, also from SysMan. This setup notifies us even if our connections to our ISP goes down etc. Also, if the modem looses the connection to the SysMan server, you get notified (watchdog). If you use a web service for messaging, you don’t get notified before users start to call in…

//Stian

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This is interesting - thanks - how does SCOM ‘output’ the alerts to the system? does it write to file?

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I’m keen to remove any reliance on email / exchange and it looks like the ‘command’ option they have would cater for this

Thanks

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What would be ‘too many’ ?

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I dont recall I do remember it happening when I used Mr Yang’s powershell script to send out notifications. It achieved what I was after with having a visible cc in the email thus ending the people claiming they never got the alert but I did get a new alert that basically when I researched it was too many scripts trying to run at once. There were settings that could be tweaked in the registry but even with in maxed out I was still hitting it. Sorry I dont remember the exact numbers and it was two years ago that I switched email to the HTML from Squared Up and I have also changed companies so I can not go back and look at my old research. If my memory is right though it was around 20-30 going out at once though don’t hold me to that.