The simplest nagios setup to make a phone call on a critical notification – using twilio service

The aim of this article is to show you the simplest way you can achieve your monitoring Nagios system to make a phone call on a critical, in our example CRITICAL host DOWN (the host is unreachable)! You will not need any server software to setup (including VoiceOverIP server), the only thing you will need is an account in https://www.twilio.com/, which even could be a free/trial account. The idea here is to be simple, cheap and easy to be accomplished.
To summarize it up:

to make a phone call to a real phone number on a CRITICAL Nagios notification

Here is what you need:

  1. A https://www.twilio.com/ trial/free account.
  2. root access to the Nagios server, because you will put a simple bash script, which uses “curl” to open an URL

The idea here is to make a phone call on a really CRITICAL issue to be able to wake up the person on duty to check the monitoring system and the SMS messages he received! So the phone call might not be accepted, at all – the ring of the phone (or continues vibrating of your smart band on your wrist!) should be enough to get a second different type of notification after the first (only and most cases only?) SMS messaging (which has the infromation for the problem!).
Keep on reading!