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[Uptime] SMS down alert

1

Hosting a few sites on WPMUdev, I want to be alerted as soon as one of my site is detected by Uptime. Since I don’t look at my emails that often, and they don’t pop on my sreen too, receiving an SMS message would have a better impact for me.

I’m sure I’m not the only one :-)

Thanks!

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 18:21:09
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The Hub
  • Levent
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    Hi Jerome… Ill second that idea :)
    Since many services send sms with a one time login code this cant be tooo expensive…
    Also sites do go down for a minute or two often, and recover… so if we set the warning buffer to 5-10 min. or so we wouldnt be bombarded either i guess…
    Anyone else has thoughts on this one?

  • Tony G
    • Mr. LetsFixTheWorld

    We’ve discussed this before, a search for SMS might turn up something. More recently I made notes about this with regard to all notifications from the Hub and WPMU DEV plugins. Summary: we need an API which will provide solutions to all such challenges, not one-off initiatives.

    Once again, today it’s SMS, tomorrow Slack, next day Discord or Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp or Telegram or IRC or IFTTT or Zapier or Integromat or … There are any number of notification channels. DEV will never win if the approach is to decide about each one, and neither will we. The better approach is to make notifications available via an API, a pub/sub mechanism, or a simple text push with unformatted text email. Or just pick one of the common services above like IFTTT or Zapier, and then let people find their own preferred destination from those hubs. Also consider Microsoft Flow, Scriptable, ActionDesk, Workato, Elastic.io, or any other integration services. How about scripting output to a Google Sheets CSV?

    The common concept here is that if DEV just makes raw data available, then we can decide what we want to do with it, whether SMS or any other channel or mechanism. (Personally I enjoy flashing the house lights when a server is down but my wife does not enjoy that one.)

    “But I just want something that works for me, I want it in WordPress, and I want it for Free” : Well, you have a choice – for everything you want, you can ask this one vendor, and then wait months, years, or forever – or you can get a single interface which makes all options available to you relatively quickly. From any of these mechanisms (plain text, API, or integration services) routing to any channel like SMS is fairly easy for DIY, and there are many solutions available for copy/paste, etc.

    Here is what you can do right now :

    1) Use your email filters to forward mail to a specific automation address. Use a new Gmail account if you wish. Just filter inbound mail on your primary account that matches what you get from WPMU DEV for Up/Down notifications. (And no, they don’t even standardize mail headers to make this easy … already requested.) So now you have a single email account that has nothing but Up/Down notices.
    2) You need code to read mail from an email account, so that you have data that can then be sent somewhere else. Google for “php read gmail” for examples and then expand from there for languages and tools that you may prefer. So now you have the data and you know that site X has changed state between up and down.
    3) Now you need code to send a message to a channel of choice – SMS, Slack, flashing the lights, etc. Google for that.

    The pattern is to ask WPMU DEV to put plain text (JSON, CSV, whatever) into some common space, then we pull from that space, then we push to our channel of choice. Compare this to asking them to push directly to every possible channel. If you want a new channel to consume your data, you already have most of the mechanisms in place, you just need to output the data to your new channel.

    For our common purposes of processing specific data from WPMU DEV, we can share knowledge and code in these forums about exactly what markers can be used to filter/parse email, and how to do each of the above steps. This can be whittled down to a series of copy/paste scripts that suit various preferences … And WPMU DEV does not need to do a single thing for us to get what we want! This gives them more time to do the things that we Really want, like fixing things that we’ve reported as being broke, and adding new features that we cannot create ourselves in their software and services.

    Sidebar: All of this already exists in some form somewhere. Google is your friend. For the last 20+ years people have wanted and created solutions to get email notifications to SMS. Also, did you know that MS Outlook already has a mechanism to send SMS from email? Maybe your email client has this. Maybe there’s already a plugin that does something like this so that you can control it from WordPress. (Hmm, I might whip that one up myself…)

    “OK OK, but I want this now, I’m not a programmer, and I don’t have time for all of this”. Everyone has different skills, preferences, time constraints, and budgets. Some people know the kid next door has been learning programming or that Uncle Jack is a retiring programmer who might enjoy doing something like this. There are a million programmers who might enjoy a Starbucks card with $5 on it to get coffee while they do this for you. Get creative. You’re working with Free and Open Source Software. Make use of this FOSS industry with some pay-forward/pay-back for all of the free stuff you get. Motivate someone to do things you want now – think about getting someone else to do something that is common so that our valued vendor here can do other things that are special.

    And that’s enough outta me. :)