Data Center Expert - Configuring alerts to detect a utility outage

[marlerc]

Description:  We are using Enterprise Data Center Expert with Colo and ITA managing our data centers, multiple regional office server rooms, hundreds of LAN closets, and all sites power is protected with Symettra and SmartUPS.

Just like another engineer who relies on Schneider solutions we want to know when utility power goes out and comes back.  This is a fundamental requirement of power protection and monitoring.

See thread: https://community.se.com/t5/EcoStruxure-IT-forum/how-do-I-create-an-alarm-to-show-the-ups-has-no-inp...

The problem:  Data Center expert can send an "on battery" alert, but the UPS goes on battery every time it self tests, and there is no ability to qualify the "on battery" state to eliminate alerting on self tests,

Consequently, Data Center Expert routinely sends hundreds of "on battery" alerts to the Enterprise Operations center.  

Rather than launch to each UPS's every time and verify the last transfer to battery was due to a self test, the operators ignore the messages.  

Is there any UPS operational or other alert state threshold that will report degraded utility conditions sufficient to transfer to battery?  We really need a better solution than this.  We ARE power monitoring, aren't we?

[APC_Steve]

Hi @marlerc ,

You're correct. The UPS goes to battery on a self test and if you're creating a manual threshold, you can not specify conditions such as on battery only when there is no self test. The manual threshold WILL get triggered in this case.

If you're using APC Symmetra and Smart-UPS however (and most other 3rd party UPS units for that matter), you should not need to create a manual threshold. As long as there have been no issues during discovery (specifically DDF related errors on APC units), the UPS already has an "on battery" alarm by default:

see on-bat.png

there are also other options that may help

see other.png

Not sure why they would not properly add as images to the reply.

This is the only option that will provide you UPS on battery when it's NOT doing a self test.

Thanks,

Steve

[marlerc]

To accommodate potential polling cycle delay and to engineer the shortest possible time from utility outage to messaging we are testing  two options:

Configuring Data Center Expert, with all the individual UPS scan settings configured to 1 minute and trapping directly

 

Also, we are configuring UPS's individually to disable self test emails to operators and email the operator from the UPS itself when on battery in response to utility outage