Monitoring a Generic UPS

eG Enterprise provides a specialized UPS monitoring model (see ) to monitor the external availability and internal health of a generic UPS and its core components.

Figure 1 : The layer model of a Generic UPS

Every layer of Figure 1 is mapped to a variety of tests which connect to the SNMP MIB of the UPS to collect critical statistics pertaining to its performance. The metrics reported by these tests enable administrators to answer the following questions:

• Is the UPS currently running on battery or on power?
• If running on battery, what is the time for which the battery has been used? Is very little running time left with the battery?
• How much charge is still remaining with the battery? Has the battery status already turned to Deplete?
• Has the battery temperature suddenly spiked?
• Were any bad input lines detected to the UPS?
• Were any severe power/voltage fluctuations discovered in the input lines?
• Is any output line consuming the power capacity of the UPS excessively?

The Network layer has been dealt with extensively in the Monitoring Cisco Router document. The sections to come will discuss the remaining layers of the layer model in detail.