The original poster hinted that "notifications" and email were options.

For SMS text message notifications, I use an AWK script to send SMTP to an email-SMS gateway. I try to keep these under the 160 character limit, only sent in extraordinary situations (high server room temp, decoy port triggering on the firewall hinting an intrusion, etc). I don't want this blowing up my phone.

For email, I have a MIME pack script that allows me to send a message with an arbitrary number of base64-encoded attachments.

Does that cover what might be in a failure alert script?