Mobile messaging for Ops Manager...

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We've had Operations Manager here at work for some time now.  We like it.  Warts and all.  One thing we did think of was how do we get notified that email is down.  There is a solution to this, SMS!

So we purchased a nice SMS device and Ops Manager gladly informed us that we had issues via the wonders of text messages.  Hoorah!  You cannot escape!!! mwwhahaha!

This was all good until we moved office.  Lovely as this office is we found that our Blackberries weren't picking up emails as often as they used to.  This office had no signal! 

This was compounded by the location of the server room.  This meant that no Ops Manager alerts got through.  We only found this out when something went wrong (isn't that always the case?)

Ok so we looked into either

1. Moving the RMS server as the modem HAS to be connected to the RMS.
2. Not having SMS messaging alerts (my boss wasn't keen)
3. Figuring something else out.

Yes you guessed it we went for option 3.  I found a nice article detailing how to provide RMS failure resilience for SMS messaging here,

http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/06/sending-out-sms-messages-with-scom.html

this led me to think of getting a software version of the serial to ethernet device mentioned in this article.  So I found one.

I then installed the software (bit brief but will go into detail later) and bingo we are working over Ethernet so I can move my modem to whereever I want to get as good a signal as possible (attached to my laptop) so we now have SMS back and working. 

Hoorah.

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