Monitor When UPS is on Battery Power

acherman

Hey everyone, I have been monitoring our UPSes over the years both by watching the input voltage and the estimated remaining battery capacity.  Last week we had one site where the utility power was all over the place and the UPS at site kept switching to battery.  So, while the input voltage was above or around the theshold specified, the capacity of the batteries was dropping for what appeared to be no reason.  Only after we logged into the UPS directly did we see it was switching onto it's batteries.

I have been playing around this morning trying to come up with a way to monitor when the UPS switches to it's batteries.  So far, no real luck.  We are using almost all TrippLite sysrtem, some with older SNMP cards, and some with the newer PowerAlert 12 cards.  Anyway, I have tried a few different OID's but can't seem to get anything that works right.  One of the OID's I did try showed up in the tree fine, but when I tried to select it or test it asked me to select a column from the table above it in the tree - see screenshot.

Does anyone have any ideas or thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

upsSecondsOnBattery_MIB_Brose.jpg

acherman

I finally figured this out - after doing a couple more SNMP walks and reading through each and every OID along the way.  haha  Should have done that in the first place.  Here is what I found from RFC1628 - UPS MIB.

upsOutput             OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { upsObjects 4 }

   upsOutputSource OBJECT-TYPE
       SYNTAX     INTEGER {
           other(1),
           none(2),
           normal(3),
           bypass(4),
           battery(5),
           booster(6),
           reducer(7)
       }
       MAX-ACCESS read-only
       STATUS     current
       DESCRIPTION
               "The present source of output power.  The enumeration
               none(2) indicates that there is no source of output
               power (and therefore no output power), for example,
               the system has opened the output breaker."
       ::= { upsOutput 1 }

This is great and perfect for me.  Bryan, I can see where checking the second on battery would work, and I seriously thought about using it.  But the OID above will give me more detail into WHY the UPS switched to battery.  Got it figured out yesterday, built an alert for it (with some issues testing, discussed in another thread), and am testing now.  Seems to work great.

For anyone else, the OID for this is 1.3.6.1.2.1.33.1.4.1 (upsObjects.4.1) Get Next, enumerated value.