Works with · IT & server monitoring
Turn Nagios CRITICAL notifications into a phone call
Send Nagios host and service alerts as text-to-speech phone calls. Add one contact, filter on CRITICAL, and the on-call admin gets rung. No plugin required.
Last updated September 2026
Nagios sends email reliably. The problem is the hour between 2 a.m. and the moment somebody opens their inbox. Routing only the CRITICAL and DOWN states to a phone call closes that gap without adding a per-seat incident platform.
yourname@email2phone.net address, narrow it with a filter, and the alerts you
choose arrive as a phone call that reads the message aloud. Nothing to install on either side.
Setting it up
- Create a contact in Nagios. In your objects directory (usually /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg) add a contact whose email is your Email2Phone address. Keep notify-service-by-email and notify-host-by-email as the notification commands — Email2Phone takes a normal email, so nothing else changes.
- Limit the notification options to the states worth a call. Set service_notification_options to c,r (critical and recovery) and host_notification_options to d,r (down and recovery). Leaving w (warning) and u (unknown) out is what keeps the phone quiet.
- Add the contact to the right contact group. Put the new contact in the contactgroup used by the hosts and services that justify waking someone — typically your production or on-call group, not every check.
- Verify and reload. Run nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg to confirm the config parses, then reload the service.
- Force a test notification. In the Nagios web interface pick a service, choose "Send custom service notification", and submit. Your phone should ring within moments and read the notification aloud.
Which alerts should ring the phone
Filter on the word CRITICAL or DOWN in the subject. Nagios puts the state in the default subject line (for example "** PROBLEM Service Alert: web-01/HTTP is CRITICAL **"), so a subject filter is enough to separate the calls from the noise.
Filters are the whole game here. A phone call is worth using precisely because it is rare — if everything calls you, nothing does. Most people end up with one or two filters and leave the rest of their notifications as email.
A filter is one condition and one action:
- If From, To, CC, Subject or Body — equals, contains, begins, ends or matches — your text.
- Then either ignore the message, or tick the phones to call. One filter can ring several people.
Anything no filter excludes goes to your default number, so you can start with "everything calls me" and tighten from there.
The wider guide to how Email2Phone works — send Nagios alerts as a phone call — covers filters, quiet hours and what happens when nobody picks up.
Nagios Core, Nagios XI, Icinga and Naemon all use the same contact-and-notification model, so these steps apply to all of them with minor path differences.
If you previously pointed a Nagios contact at a carrier gateway such as @txt.att.net or @vtext.com, replace that address with your Email2Phone address. AT&T and T-Mobile have closed those gateways and Verizon closes vtext.com on 31 March 2027.
An MSP routes its overnight Nagios alerts this way: how they set it up, and what happens at 3 a.m. now.
What happens when the call comes
Your phone rings and says a message is waiting. Press 1 to hear it, then 8 to save it, 7 to delete it or 5 to record a spoken reply; on a phone with voicemail switched off, nothing counts as delivered until someone does, and Email2Phone calls back, five times over three hours, if nobody does. A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email. Ringing several phones, quiet hours and dial-in replay are each covered in Help.
What it costs, wherever you are
Email2Phone calls any phone in any country. Plans start at $10/month for 40 call credits, and a minute costs 1 credit to the US and Canada and 1–6 credits elsewhere — most alert calls are well under a minute either way. An admin routing only genuine outages to a call typically stays inside the Basic plan. Check the rate for your own number with the calculator.
Nagios questions
Does Email2Phone need a Nagios plugin or NRPE?
No. Email2Phone receives ordinary email, so it works with the built-in notify-by-email commands. There is nothing to install on the Nagios server.
Can different services call different people?
Yes. Use separate Email2Phone filters matching text in the subject or body — for example the hostname or a service group name — and route each filter to a different phone number.
What happens during a notification storm?
Use Nagios notification escalations and service dependencies to suppress duplicates at the source, and set an Email2Phone filter narrow enough that only genuine outages trigger a call.
Other tools that work the same way
Email2Phone works with anything that can send an email, so the pattern above applies far beyond this one tool.