Mobile Alerts from Rackspace Monitoring

Sometimes, an email alert isn't enough. If you are on call, on the go, or far from Wi-Fi, mobile alerts are a necessity. For the most critical problems, you can set up notifications from multiple form factors, combining SMS with our other notification types.

Get Notified with SMS

As a Rackspace Monitoring customer, you can now leverage unlimited SMS worldwide at no additional cost. SMS alerting has the following advantages:

  • Ensures that you never miss a major incident.
  • Adds another layer of redundancy to your alerting.
  • Pushes alerts to your device so that you don't need to pull them down from a mail server.
  • Supports the most basic devices and doesn't require an expensive data plan. (Standard text messaging rates from your carrier apply.)
  • Delivers alerts anywhere you have a cell signal.

Set up Alerts

You configure SMS alerts for your account by adding one or more new notifications through the raxmon CLI. You can add SMS alerts to an existing notification plan, or you can create a new one. Be sure to attach the notification plan to one or more alarms. For step-by-step guidance, see the tutorial on setting up notifications and notification plans in the Rackspace Monitoring Getting Started Guide.

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You can create alarms and notifications in any order, but to create a new notification plan, you need to create a notification first.

Tune out unwanted alerts

If you receive too many texts, or you don't want to get alerts during a maintenance period, you can perform the following actions:

  • Set up suppressions to mute alerts during planned events.
  • Reconfigure your alerting preferences in the Cloud Control Panel or use the raxmon CLI.
  • Tune your notification plans to ensure that the system sends only the most important notifications by SMS.
  • Reply STOP to any text. This action stops all SMS alerts for that phone number for all alarms.

The SMS alerting functionality is available to US and UK Rackspace Monitoring customers.

Additional Resources

Complete API reference for Rackspace Monitoring