To increase visibility of critical alerts, I’ve set up Zabbix to send messages to the phones of certain technicians via a GSM modem. This post documents what I had to do to get things running.
- Zabbix server
- MOXA ethernet-to-serial gateway
- Siemens GSM modem
The first thing to do is to get the driver for the MOXA gateway running. The documentation is alrightish and covers some of the most used Linux distributions. Dissappointingly, after running through the checklist in the README file, the MOXA gateway will only work until after the next reboot.
The problem here, is that the init script for the MOXA driver removes and then recreates the device nodes on startup, and the scripts being called (mxmknod and mxrmnod) contain references to current dir (./) rather than their absolute path (/usr/lib/npreal2/driver). Edit those scripts, and you’ll have a working driver even after the Zabbix server reboots.
It should now be possible to test the modem by running, for example, socat - /dev/ttyr00 and entering some AT commands like in the olden days.
The next step is to install the gsm-utils package, which will create the possibility to easily send messages. Without any other options set, the gsmsendsms command expects there to be a device called /dev/mobilephone. We can create that one by making a symlink with that name to /dev/ttyr00, or we can tell the command which device to use with the -d argument.
Try sending a message: gsmsmssend -d /dev/ttyr00 <phone_number> "Hello World!"
This does not immediately solve how to send messages from Zabbix, though. Recent versions of Zabbix do have an SMS media type that can be called on, but it doesn’t seem to work when not speaking directly to one of the two modems on the compatibility list. Fortunately it’s very easy to create a new media type:
To prepare for this, create the folder /etc/zabbix/alertscripts, then modify the AlertScriptsPath definition in /etc/zabbix/zabbix-sever.conf to point at this directory, and restart the Zabbix Server service.
Now create the script /etc/zabbix/alertscripts/sendsms with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash
serial=`date +%s | cut -c 6-`
/usr/bin/gsmsendsms -d /dev/ttyr00 -b 115200 -c $serial $1 "$2"The -c $serial argument is used to create a unique ID when serializing messages longer than 160 characters, as per the SMS standard. $1 will be populated with the contact phone number, and $2 will be populated by the actual message from Zabbix.
Finally let’s create our Media Type definition in Zabbix:
Under Administration -> Media Types -> Create Media Type define the following:
Name: SMS via MOXA
Type: Script
Script Name: sendsms
Script Parameters:
{ALERT.SENDTO}
{ALERT.MESSAGE}To be able to alert users, Zabbix needs to know how to contact them using this new media type:
Administration -> Users -> <username> -> Media -> Add
Type: SMS via Moxa
Send to: <phonenumber>
When active: schedule during which to receive alerts
Use if severity: Severity levels to send via SMS
Enabled:And finally you need to create Actions that define when to send messages via this solution, under Configuration -> Actions.
Voilà: Zabbix just got a bit noisier, in a good way.