Monitoring Uninterruptable Power Supplies with NerveCenter’s UPSCenter Application

Drivers of the Need to Monitor Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS)

Primary utility power outages do occur; often caused by poor infrastructure or weather.  As the size, complexity and criticality of networks continue to grow, reliable backup op UPS power is critical to network uptime.

Why Is UPS Monitoring Important

Unplanned data center outages are often caused by:

• UPS battery failure
• UPS capacity overload
• UPS equipment failure

Most of these outages can be prevented.  Implementing UPS monitoring tools is a prevention technique.

Additionally, UPS batteries lose capacity in as early as three years.  While UPS battery manufacturers may market their batteries with a ten-year design life or life span, external factors can cause degradation and shorten battery life.  Issues that can shorten the life of a battery string include:

• High or low charge voltage
• Excessive current charge
• Overcharging and over cycling
• Incoming power faults resulting in UPS engagement

Properly monitored UPS batteries can extend battery life and detect and prevent failures.

Successful UPS monitoring requires, at a minimum, the following performance metrics:

• Internal cell resistance (via temperature) – To verify the state of health by identifying low capacity cells Inter-Cell Resistance – conduction path integrity between cells to avoid hot spots, fires, and abrupt shutdowns via temperature monitoring
• Load cycles – Check the number and depth of discharges
• Load current – Track current delivered by the battery during discharge to determine actual battery capacity
• Overall cell voltage – verify each individual cell is charging properly

Benefits of Proactive Remote UPS Monitoring

• Improve uptime and prevent network outages caused by UPS failures, UPS capacity issues and drained UPS battery power
• Detect problems with individual bad cells
• Monitor battery temperature to help detect battery issues
• Properly monitored UPS battery systems have a longer life, require less energy to charge and require less preventive maintenance
• Provides information for educated battery purchasing decisions
• Better SLA management through control over performance and uptime
• Improved budgetary controls
• Lower C02 foot print and Green Image
• Reduces mean-time-to-repair
• Increases customer satisfaction and retention

Why UPSCenter

• Monitor and display alerts centrally
• Scalable to monitor thousands of UPS battery systems
• Works with all UPS manufacturers
• Provides historical trending
• Agentless
• Cableless
• Can monitor across internal networks
• 7 X 24 alerts and notifications
• Software solution
• Utilizes standard SNMP UPS MIB

UPSCenter Use Cases

Highlights of NerveCenter’s UPSCenter use cases:

• Monitor battery status:-
  • On street or battery power – determines if battery and has enough runtime to meet SLA
  • On street – monitor life and charge levels based on performance thresholds
  • On battery – calculates charge and time remaining – 75% or more chare capacity
• Monitor Total UPS load across all outlets (alarms on threshold vs rating) – ties to the total UPS load
• UPS status is less than its rated load –
  • Load vs. No-load – indicators if UPS has failed, failing or not functioning
• Monitor repeated on battery status – if UPS goes on battery over defined period of time (indicator of dirty power)
  • Maintains a counter over 24 hour period (alarms on repeated status)
• Monitor multi-vendor UPS – UPS vendor agnostic –
• Connect all types of UPS through flexible communication protocols (SNMP, APIs, Serial Protocols, etc.)