I read abt it somewhere but can't recall.

Help me find a service which sends me SMS, any time a ticket is opened or my server goes down.

Well you can use the www.clickatell.com gateway to send SMS messages. It has several different forms of API's so you can integrate it with server monitoring or helpdesk software.

Has there been any freeware available for SMS, although a little off-topic. I'd like to use this to monitor some of our networks to send SMS alerts, and management doesn't want to spend any change.

Cell phone carriers usually always have an email address associated with a phone number on their network. For example, cingular is [phone number]@cingularme.com (or something like that). Any email send to the address goes to the phone's inbox like a normal text message.

That's the closest solution you can find for free.

Thanks, something I wanted to include in our support system that will alert us of an support ticket.

John

We use SMS for network monitoring (although we've had a lot of problems with clickatell and their APIs not working properly).

However, if you're wanting to be alerted of support tickets then why not find a phone with a cheap data plan and set up an email client on the phone which will check for support tickets? Same again could work for monitoring your network on the cheap, using an off-site IMAP server.

For the sake of a few dollars/euros/pounds we'd prefer to just sign up for a multitude of server monitoring sites and have them monitor key servers in our network, true if anything happens we'll get bombarded but if i've fallen asleep it is sure to wake me.

If a company (or its management) won't pay the few dollars to monitor their network then I'm not sure why they would have any customers.

just my 2 cents/pence/eurocents/other random currency