Is better Eaton polling possible? Here's my UPS dashboard.

Hello all, I haven't been working with Solarwinds for very long, only a few months. In that time I've managed to piece together this little dashboard that allows me to monitor reported battery capacity and reported runtime on APC and Eaton UPS within our environment.

Here's a photo of the dashboard. What I'd like to accomplish is getting the Eaton Battery Capacity to report it's time in minutes instead of percentage of 100. The same with the remaining run time. I'd like to display the Eaton remaining minutes in the HH:MM:SS format.

Additionally one thing that is very important is for tracking and lookback purposes is the ability for the Eaton UPS to display battery update status event information, like what it shown under the Last 25 Events column. I haven't yet figured out how to get out Eatons to display that. w

Please let me know what information is needed from me to help y'all help me on this one. If this is in the wrong location then I apologize, please feel free to move it.

Thanks all.

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eaton

ups_monitoring

apc monitoring

Polling

Accepted answers

mesverrum

So the root issue you are dealing with is that each of those vendors reports their SNMP data in different formats and you want to try and make them the same. Unfortunately SWQL doesn't have very strong control over formats like that built in so you'll need to do quite a bit of string manipulation and math to get it converted over. It's doable I think, but its just going to be kind of a mess to figure out. It would be a lot easier to do in pure SQL but the SQL widgets look different, a bit more cluttered IMO, so there might be aesthetic reasons not to go that way.

For the percentage to minutes, isn't that already what the run time remaining data is? 99% of the first battery at the current load will run dead in 53 minutes unless i misunderstand your question.

For the events you might just raise a ticket with SW and see if they can pass that along to the devs that the behavior is not consistent across the two brands. SW added specific events aimed at recording changes for the APC and as best I can tell they just didn't do that on the Eaton side. Maybe there was a reason, maybe just an oversight when they added those features in a few years ago. The brute force solution if they won't address it on their end would be to create informational alerts for any changes you want to record on your Eatons and then have the alert action just write whatever event message you like to the NPM Event Log. You can create whatever custom events you want that way.

All comments

mesverrum

For the percentage to minutes, isn't that already what the run time remaining data is? 99% of the first battery at the current load will run dead in 53 minutes unless i misunderstand your question.

NorthernNetGuy

Would it be possible for you to share a copy of this dashboard? It has almost everything I'm looking for to cover the UPS's in my environment

MulattoTech

What do you mean by share a copy? Is there a way for me to export it? If so how do I do that?

Thanks!

NorthernNetGuy

Ah sorry, I had thought there was a method to export these, I'm still fairly new to solarwinds.

I've just configured the UNDPs for my Eaton and APC UPS's, and i'm trying to get the data to display simialrly to yours.

Would you be able to share the configuration of the Widgets? I'm piecing it together on my own, but if you could share the Data source and table layout configs it would really help me out.

Thanks!

MulattoTech

It should be fairly simple to setup. The widgets in question are simply "Universal Device Poller Summary Status" widgets that monitor different pollers. Just setup the pollers you want and toss them in that widget.

pyrobrit

If I look at the XUPS-MIB then this gives me the runtime in minutes for the Eaton UPS

XUPS-MIB 1.3.6.1.4.1.534.1.2.1.0 xupsBatTimeRemaining.0

ChrisWade

This all looks very impressive and we have been tasked with doing something similar. My question is how many points did you need in your Solarwinds NPM licence for the above information? I know the licencing isn't cheap, so if you needed 10 points per UPS for example, you would be looking at about 200 points for the above. The customer would like this on about 15 separate sites, so they would need to get individual licences so could run quite high.

mesverrum

That's not how solarwinds licenses work. A UPS counts against one "Node" in your NPM license. However many data points you collect is not relevant to licensing.

It gets a little more complicated when it comes to switches as they do charge by the number of monitored interfaces, but when it comes to power, it's just nodes.

ChrisWade

Thanks, that's good to know. Unfortunately I was told exactly the same when we started monitoring switches that each switch was a node under the NCM licence to then find out all the ports needed NPM licences as well. We will have to test to prove this however as the licencing is difficult to understand.