Nagios Phone Call Alerts — Get Called on Nagios Alarms

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.

The short version: point Nagios at youryourname@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 orBody — equals, contains, begins, ends ormatches — 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.

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.

What happens when the call comes

Your phone rings and a voice reads the alert aloud — press 1 for the header, 2 for the body.
You have to acknowledge it. Press 8 to save, 7 to delete or 5 to record a spoken reply. Until somebody presses one of those, the alert counts as undelivered.
Not acknowledged? Email2Phone leaves voicemail if you enabled that, or calls back at 5, 15, 30, 60 and once more at 60 minutes, and keeps the message in your online history.
Ring several numbers at once or one after another, and choose whether the escalation stops as soon as somebody acknowledges or continues until everyone has been called.
A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email — Email2Phone tells you how many messages are waiting, so a tool that fires 80 notifications in two minutes rings you once.
Quiet hours are set per phone number, so an alert can reach a mobile overnight and a desk phone during the day. Planned maintenance? Suspend delivery from the account settings.
Replay anything later by dialing in — access numbers in the US, Canada and UK, free on every plan.

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.

Turn Nagios CRITICAL notifications into a phone call