Okay, braintrust, I got a question.

My paging system is dependent on my PBX being functional. My PBX being functional is dependent on VoIP being up. VoIP being up is dependent on there being power. And power is dependent on the UPS not being dead. Which I can depend on for about two hours, maybe three. But this is the Pacific Northwest and we've had longer outages before.

If I have a notification that power will go down, my wife can notify the clients she needs to and tell them to call her cell phone. If I've got a two hour window on that, I'm gravy. And what I was going to do is use a Synology Router because it runs DSM and I can totally get DSM to monitor the USB port on the back and go "whoopsidaisy here's an email" when the UPS says "power's off, yo." But then I decided that this particular router sucks as a router and sucks as a wifi device so I went with a Netgear Nighthawk instead. And that, as far as I can tell, isn't smart enough to take a UPS input and go "power be down, y'all."

So I can get little $150 chunks of shit that will call me, but they're sucking down an ATA port that I'd rather use for fax. I can buy a baby Diskstation to sit there and act as a Time Machine target but they're like $400 with disks. I can probably buy a Stick PC and trigger it to do something clever but I figure there's people here who are way better at networking than I am and there must be some clever way to, say, ping my VPN or something and see if my canary is dead, for example. Whatever that canary might be.

So how would you do it? You've got a live network for two hours, and you need to send out a notification (email, mms or phone is fine) when the power kicks.

How do you do it?