Get a phone call when a PRTG sensor goes down

Last updated September 2026

PRTG notification templates are flexible but every delivery method still ends in something you have to be looking at. Adding an email notification addressed to Email2Phone gives you a channel that interrupts.

Setting it up

1. Create a notification template. Go to Setup → Account Settings → Notification Templates and add a new template. Name it something like "Phone call — on-call".
2. Add a "Send Email" action. Inside the template, enable Send Email and put your Email2Phone address in the "Send to Email Address" field. Leave the format as text — the call reads the text aloud, so HTML formatting adds nothing.
3. Keep the subject short and spoken-friendly. PRTG's default subject uses placeholders such as [%sitename] %device %name %status. A shorter subject like "%device %name is %status" reads much better over a phone.
4. Attach the template to a notification trigger. Open the device, group or sensor that matters, go to its Notification Triggers tab, and add a State Trigger: when the sensor is Down for X seconds, perform your new template. Set it on a parent group to cover everything beneath it.
5. Test the template. Use the "Test" button on the notification template in Setup. PRTG sends a sample notification and your phone rings.

Which alerts should ring the phone

Filter on the word "Down" in the subject. If you set triggers on several groups, include the group or site name in the PRTG subject and use that to route different groups to different phones.

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.

Set an escalation on the trigger — PRTG can repeat the notification after a delay, and Email2Phone will place another call each time, which is useful if the first person does not answer.

Paessler's own comparison pages push customers toward SMS gateways for urgent alerts. A phone call needs no gateway, no SIM and no hardware.

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.

PRTG Network Monitor questions

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.

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• UptimeRobot
• Synology NAS
• Microsoft 365 / Outlook
• Temperature & freezer sensors
• See all integrations