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APC UPS - NPM Not Catching On Battery Event

I have 8 APC UPS's I recently added to NPM, and they use the APC 9630 NMC 2 card running v6.8.8 firmware, which by my research is the latest firmware. The issue I'm having is NPM never catches the On Battery event, instead it shows Unknown and never triggers an alert. Am I missing something here? Thanks.

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rschroeder

Forgive me for asking what may be a very basic question, but do you have the APC UPS's set to send snmp traps to your Solarwinds poller? And are the UPS's also configured to send syslog messages to your poller?

If you haven't set the UPS's up to do this, and haven't successfully tested their information flow & traps / alerts, then that might be a great next step.

Swift Packets!

Rick Schroeder

nickburns186

They are set for both syslog and Traps, but let me verify the flow which I'll do now. Good tip.

nickburns186

They are all sending traps, but not syslog. I'll set that up now and let you know the results. Thanks for pointing that out.

bobmarley

As Rschroeder pointed out you should be polling from SolarWinds so you can keep the history of the metrics but for items such as 'on battery' you may want to depend on Syslog or SNMP Traps. Those will get sent to you almost instantly where the polling usually only gets done every few minutes. If your UPS is very loaded and only stays up a few minutes you may not even get a poll in before the batteries run down.

nickburns186

I appreciate that and realize that, but I'm also trying to understand the intended functionality of the PCU widget and what it takes to make it function. I made a custom query with custom pollers only to find this widget.

nickburns186

Maybe we're talking about different things though. The event summary isn't part of the PCU widget so I should clarify that so you know where I'm coming from. I see what you are saying though, via polling it may kick on/off battery quick enough where a polling cycle misses it versus a trap. I've been used to using universal device pollers and custom queries over the years in NPM to deal with UPS's, so I suppose I thought NPM, in more recent versions, out of the box with APC devices sending traps/syslog worked out of the gate. I get it now though. Thank you both.

bobmarley

Does the 'Time on Battery' field change from Zero when power is lost?

rschroeder

Yes, it begins counting up from zero, in minutes, then perhaps minutes and hours, tracking the amount of time the battery is providing power to your equipment.

APC UPS's I've monitored also provide NPM with information about how much battery time they have left before they shut down during a power outage. This information has given me time to reach out to customers and their managers to tell them how long they have before their network shuts down. And it provides incentive to power providers when I call to report power outages to them.

Swift Packets!

Rick Schroeder