Forum Discussion

Mac's avatar
Mac
5 years ago

Reporting APC PDU power usage

I have a client looking to monitor their colo rack power usage and have a monthly report showing consumed power.
Ultimately, they want to be sure they are being billed fairly by their hosting data center for the amount of power consumed.

the basic Idea is to use the snmp info from the PDU to aggregate the monthly power consumed.
Logic monitor has APC PDU data sources that include a "live" view of the amps per phase on the 3 phase PDU

Ideally, we want to avoid using APC datacenter expert or the like to manage the data.
Has anyone worked on converting the amps to kilowatts and reporting on that directly in logic monitor?

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    5 years ago

    Yeah, you'll need to create a "Resource Metric Trend". Setup the filter so that it includes the instances you're interested in and the new live power usage datapoint. Then make sure the sum column is checked/included. It will sum the datapoint over the timeframe for each instance (row) in the report.

  • Mac's avatar
    Mac
    5 years ago
    On 8/26/2020 at 8:53 AM, Stuart Weenig said:

    You'd need to know the RMS Voltage along with the Amps as well as the power factor (assuming AC). If those metrics are available via SNMP from the PDU, this should be doable.

     

    i've found that newer APC PDUs have a datasource for live power usage 
    I am able to report on that with live data and see the graph for past usage

    the next hurdle is to find a way to sum the usage for a given time period
    I dont see a clear way to do that using any of the available dashboard widgets. 
    Is this even possible?

    the only possible solution Ive come up with is to assume power consumption will remain close to the same, then multiply the KW usage by a set integer representing hours of  month to estimate monthly KW hours consumed.
    But this is a horrendously inaccurate representation for power usage over time. 

    Any suggestions?

  • Mac's avatar
    Mac
    5 years ago
    1 hour ago, Stuart Weenig said:

    You'd need to know the RMS Voltage along with the Amps as well as the power factor (assuming AC). If those metrics are available via SNMP from the PDU, this should be doable.

    Thanks Stuart.
    the PDU I am testing with does not include the SNMP info for voltage and power factor with the default data source.
    I will need to do an SNMP walk to see if i can pull that data manually 

    i may need to test with a newer PDU as well. 

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    5 years ago

    You'd need to know the RMS Voltage along with the Amps as well as the power factor (assuming AC). If those metrics are available via SNMP from the PDU, this should be doable.