Monitoring UPS Batteries

[Jeff Zylstra]

Just curious what everyone does to monitor the batteries on the UPS units attached to their workstations.  I usually take my laptop in to the office, connect to each desktop and then run the APC Powerchute software to see what the condition of each battery is.  Do any of you just install the software on the desktop and connect the cables, or just wait for the batteries to die and the units to beep?

[Mark]

I don't use these on desktops.  Only on servers.  I have a couple desktop grade UPS that are on other things and those I replace when they beep.

Good timing on this though.  I received a text alert from my SmartUPS last night that one ore more batteries are bad and it failed a self-test.  Will have those batteries replaced first thing tomorrow morning.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Yes, I like the "smart connect" feature on my new rack mount UPS units for my servers.  It's nice to get some "fair warning" that the battery is going, that it's running on the UPS, etc....  I kind of thought that's what most people did.  Thanks, Mark.

[Mark]

I don't really like ad-hoc management of things because it requires effort to get information.  If I had UPS on all the desktops, I would definitely have them connected and software installed.  Both for the automatic shutdown and for the information.  At that point, I would figure out a method to centralize the data and a method of receiving notification for both battery health and UPS activity.  I'm not sure exactly what this would look like, but that would be my goal.  Maybe it's the software logging to the event log and an event log trigger sending me a notification, or maybe it's the software logging to a central logging server and that server sending out notifications.  Either way, if I can't get information from a device or tool somehow, I'm not inclined to use said tool unless I can't get around it.

[Jeff Zylstra]

i only use the UPS for the first 10 seconds until our generator kicks on.  If that doesn't happen, I figure that I'm screwed anyways!  Our generator runs for 10 minutes the same time every week, so I put a reminder on my calendar to listen for that and check the oil and coolant, etc.... 

[Jeff Golas]

I'm pretty sure APC has some kind of software or system for this, but you may have to buy it.

That said, it looks like (depending on make/model of the UPS), that if you do connect the UPS to a desktop and install software, and if it's recognized as a UPS by Windows, that it does present some management information, see here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/cimwin32prov/cim-uninterruptiblepowersupply

This may not make a lot of sense to those not eyeballs deep in desktop management (nor am I saying I'm there either lol), but basically by connecting a UPS, and depending on what info the UPS gives the desktop, the desktop then makes that data available to other software via something called WMI/CIM (either abbreviation is basically the same thing). If you're old school and know what SNMP is, CIM is basically the modern iteration of it and uses almost the same concepts.

You can use Powershell to query CIM; its also called WMI but I think that name is going away in favor of CIM (I think) because CIM being the generic standard and WMI was Microsoft's flavor of it. "Common Information Model" vs "Windows Management Instrumentation)". It may also be that WMI is Microsoft's flavor as it supports the generic standard CIM but adds Windows data to it as well. You can read/learn about it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmisdk/wmi-start-page

To try powershell, you can use the command get-wmiobject, then when it asks for class, use Win32_bios. Basically thats asking for bios information from the collection of data under Win32. The pages I list above detail all the various classes (buckets) of information you can get.

For UPSes though, I dont think there's any real battery capacity metric, unless you did a runtime calibration on it (even then its a guesstimate). The only real data would be an actual error from the UPS, or better yet, just check track purchase dates and assume you need to replace the batteries every 3 years whether or not they test good (thats the rule of thumb for server UPSes, I think desktop stuff isnt as critical unless it is).

Jeff

I don't really like ad-hoc management of things because it requires effort to get information.  If I had UPS on all the desktops, I would definitely have them connected and software installed.  Both for the automatic shutdown and for the information.  At that point, I would figure out a method to centralize the data and a method of receiving notification for both battery health and UPS activity.  I'm not sure exactly what this would look like, but that would be my goal.  Maybe it's the software logging to the event log and an event log trigger sending me a notification, or maybe it's the software logging to a central logging server and that server sending out notifications.  Either way, if I can't get information from a device or tool somehow, I'm not inclined to use said tool unless I can't get around it.

[Mark]

I'm pretty sure APC has some kind of software or system for this, but you may have to buy it.

Right - I think the APC software can only monitor the UPS connected to the machine it is running on, unless the UPS is "networkable".  Not familiar with where it could go from there.

[Jeff Zylstra]

So am I to understand that simply plugging in a UPS unit to a USB port may do a plug and play installation of some latent Windows component that I could use?  If it would generate some kind of Windows Event Viewer code, I might be able to have it send me an email after I research the component a bit.  I suppose I could do something with Power Script, but that seems like a lot of work.  If it's not easy, I might just try and get them all on a schedule every three years.  Thanks, Jeff.

[Mark]

So am I to understand that simply plugging in a UPS unit to a USB port may do a plug and play installation of some latent Windows component that I could use?  If it would generate some kind of Windows Event Viewer code, I might be able to have it send me an email after I research the component a bit.  I suppose I could do something with Power Script, but that seems like a lot of work.  If it's not easy, I might just try and get them all on a schedule every three years.  Thanks, Jeff.

Potentially, yes.  However, I do believe that APC has "PowerChute" that I thought was a free download, but it has been a while since I used that.  I feel like on Windows 7, I've seen the UPS  show up as a battery... maybe it was a UPS, I cna't remember.  I say pick one and give it a try, see what it can do.

[Jeff Zylstra]

That's exactly what I intend to do, when I have time.  Thanks, Mark.