How to Receive Alarms from Your Network in Case of a Failing Internet Connection

Published by Gerald Schoch
Last updated on March 03, 2022 • 6 minute read

The notification system of PRTG Network Monitor is the most powerful tool to keep you informed about the status of your network. You probably use push notifications, emails, or SMS text messages to stay up to date about your IT environment. PRTG notifies you whenever it discovers downtimes, an overloaded system, exceeded thresholds, or other unusual situations. This way you can even proactively fix any issues before it gets really bad. But what happens if your network loses connection to the internet?

receive alarms from network in case of failing internet
You will not receive alarms about a malfunctioning device or service, cannot do anything about the issue immediately because you are simply not aware of it, and the cause for the alarm might turn into a critical impact on your business processes.

 

To avoid missed notifications as much as possible, we strongly recommend that you always set up a second notification type as a backup to your primary notification method for critical errors. For example, if you use push notifications as your main notification type, which are usually reliable and fast, you would not receive any alarms when your main leased line or the used cloud services fail by an outage. A good approach to set up a more failsafe notification system is to additionally create SMS notifications and send them out via a hardware SMS gateway. In doing so, you won't have to rely on a working internet connection to get notified about alarms. If you use push notifications as your primary method, you can even receive redundant notifications on the same device that you have with you anyway. Configure a latency for SMS notifications in PRTG to avoid double notifications when you react in a timely manner.

SMSEagle in Lab SMSEagle in our lab

 

For example, SMSEagle is an SMS gateway that you can use to send text messages to your mobile phone independently from a working internet connection. You do not need an account with an internet SMS provider—simply connect the SMS gateway (that has a SIM card) to your network and provide an HTTP API call in the SMS delivery settings of PRTG to send all SMS notifications via the SMSEagle device.

 

As an example on how to use such gateways, we provide a detailed tutorial in our Knowledge Base about how to set up SMSEagle and integrate it with PRTG. Please see this article: "How can I send SMS text notifications using SMSEagle SMS Gateway with PRTG?"

You can also find instructions there about how to monitor the SMS gateway to be sure your notification system works perfectly. For example, monitor SMSEagle with the brand new SNMP Custom Advanced Sensor. You can download an according device template here.

 

Setting up this notification approach takes only 5 configuration steps—and then you can relax because you know: PRTG will alert you even if your network has no internet connection!