Setting up alerting on Ecostruxure DCE?

[jf_at_ag]

Hi...I've been trying to set up alerting for the past 2 months and I have run out of brick walls bash my face against. This is the most unintuitive interface I've every come across, and the online help is useless. Support tells me this forum is monitored by APC DCE folks so hopefully I can get some traction here.

Under Alarm Configuration, there is a Notification Policy called On Battery Power. I don't remember at this point if I created it or it's packaged with DCE. If I open it, I'm in the Edit Notification Policy window and it has Actions on top and tabs for Thresholds and Devices down below. It's not clear if I'm supposed to add devices to a Threshold, or add a threshold to Devices. If I click on Choose Thresholds, a new window opens that seems to have nothing to do with the previous Edit window. Inside that window I can choose a different device than the one that was highlighted when I clicked Choose Threshold, which makes zero sense from a continuity standpoint. And I still haven't found where to do the simple task of alerting when a UPS goes on battery power, perhaps the most simple alerting of all. 

I would greatly appreciate any direction, manual, flowchart, hierarchy of parameters, anything to get me through this festering pile before I toss it into the trash, set it on fire, and never buy an APC product again. 

Jesus christ how many freakin captchas does one need to pass before a post is deemed valid????

thanks,

jim

[spezialist]

@jf_at_ag,

I suggest you watch the following short video instructions on your question. Maybe this will help you understand the logic of the settings.

Configuring Email Notifications in StruxureWare Data Center Expert | Schneider Electric Support 

Creating and Managing Thresholds in StruxureWare Data Center Expert | Schneider Electric Support

WWith best regards.

[ATrabert]

I 2nd watching the help videos, I also took a few mins to write a detailed explanation of how alarm notification works in DCE.

a notification policy has alert actions in it and handles what DCE does when it sees a device alarm.  The most common alert actions are either "send email" or "send short message email".  When you add alert actions to a notification policy, you configure it with delays, intervals, repeats, etc. For example if you only need an email when it occurs and email when the alert clears, you would set everything to 0.  Or you could do the inverse and have a comm lost policy with all of the communication lost thresholds, then set an 11 min delay so that the alert has to be active in DCE before DCE sends out an alert email.

notification policies can be associated to devices (and all of its device alarms) or thresholds alarms.  Device alarms are all of the alarms built into the apc network card (like on battery) and use a separate alarm device definition file that's downloaded from the network card upon device discovery; of if its a 3rd party device, all of the Device Alarms are typically in the sensor device definition file (DDF).  Device alarms can only have a single notification policy for all alarms on the device, but thresholds can be associated in multiple policies.  

There is typically a "default" policy in dce that gets associated with devices upon discovery, but you can use additional ones if you want some devices to use specific alert actions and others to use different ones (think if you had region offices and 1 policy per office).

At minimum, you need 1 notification policy, with an alert action configured and added to it. Then associate all your devices and thresholds with it.

For on battery alerts, those are actually kind of complex because they due to the way DCE snmp polling works with APC devices and 3rd party devices. The on battery event needs to be active for at least 15-30 seconds with priority scanning (aka trap based polling) on APC devices or up to 5 mins on a 3rd party device (depending on the polling interval, 5 mins is default, it can be lowered to 1 min).

If your on battery event only lasts a few seconds until a generator turns on, then it is likely that DCE may never see that alert and you would be better off having the UPS send it's own on battery alerts.   Every other alarm typically lasts longer though and DCE would catch those fine.