SMB IT Market Opportunity: 5 Tips To Maximize Business Value With Next-Generation Power Monitoring

By Art Mulligan, Product Line Manager, Eaton

Employing the manual, reactive power monitoring approaches of the past isn’t sustainable in today’s fast paced, interconnected environments. In many organizations, administrators are still working with a number of point monitoring tools — tools that are designed to monitor a specific technology or layer in the technology stack. Consequently, administrators have to manually generate and sift through cryptic monitoring data, maintain multiple tools and contend with conflicting or confusing alarms — making monitoring too time consuming and costly. At the same time, these internally sourced approaches increasingly fail to deliver the accurate insights needed to help ensure your customer’s 100 percent uptime.

It is for these reasons that organizations should leverage next-generation power monitoring services with the following five requirements in mind.

1. Combine remote monitoring and diagnosis with value-added services

Whether an organization is managing a single power unit down the hall, or a globally distributed network of expansive data centers, it is critical to employ continuous monitoring and automated, immediate alerting and routing, so appropriate team members are informed in a timely manner.

The reality is that monitoring has been employed for quite some time. In fact, the problem is that most data center staff members have too much data; what they lack is targeted, timely and useful insights. Instead of having staff rely on manual, reactive monitoring efforts, organizations need to leverage real-time monitoring combined with experienced technicians to track information and follow up when required. Effective monitoring solutions are also critical for first responders. When coupled with a service organization that has proven experience, training, safety records and response times, these solutions are invaluable.

2. Deliver data-driven insights and predictive analytics

The evolution toward next-generation power monitoring services can perhaps best be viewed by comparing it to the evolution of auto repairs. In the past, when a car broke down or encountered issues, the attending mechanic would need to go through a process of trial and error — replacing parts, testing functionality and repeating these efforts until the issue was resolved. Today, however, many cars are equipped with an array of sensors. When mechanics can leverage this breadth of data and intelligent diagnostic tools, they can perform faster, more cost effective repairs.

Further, many vehicle manufacturers are using technology to help preempt issues completely. For example, GM now offers predictive maintenance technology in some of its vehicles. Pairing the vehicle’s Internet connectivity and extensive sensors, data is fed into big data analytics programs that can determine whether a component failure is imminent, and, if so, issue a notification to the driver.

In the world of data center power, similar advancements are taking place. By combining comprehensive diagnostic data, effective capture and analytics, advanced workflows and domain expertise, next-generation power monitoring services will enable maintenance, troubleshooting and repairs to be much more data-driven. These services will offer your customers richer data on specific devices and enable more effective comparisons between a particular unit and averages of entire fleet.

Field technicians can also be armed with complete details before they arrive at the site. Rather than undertaking a lengthy trial-and-error process, they can start remediating with a detailed understanding of the issue and even arrive on site with the right parts and equipment — the first time.

As in the automotive industry, power monitoring will begin to move from reactive to proactive models via predictive analytics. Through these capabilities, administrators will be able to accurately predict component failures in power equipment days or weeks before they actually occur. For example, an administrator can be alerted to a potential issue through battery health indicators, reducing the risk of outage due to battery failure.

3. Provide asset management capabilities

Next-generation power monitoring services deliver comprehensive asset management capabilities. This requires tracking comprehensive data about a particular asset like a UPS, which includes such details as battery date code, battery model and type, firmware version, service history, capacitors and so on. This granular detail should be easily accessible to administrators to facilitate inspection, reporting and remediation.

This kind of information can also be extremely useful. When an administrator can track data like battery date codes and service history, they can provide much faster and more efficient planning and analysis. For example, they may see that a battery is five years old. That means it may be reaching the end of its useful life, and your customer will need to replace it soon.

As next-generation power monitoring services continue to evolve, they’ll also enable central, efficient management of an organization’s entire power infrastructure, including UPSs, PDUs and other power systems from multiple vendors.

4. Provide intuitive, convenient, and visual reporting

Next-generation power monitoring services need to deliver timely, focused insights to the people who need them. To do that, monitoring services should feature these components:

• Intuitive dashboards that provide at-a-glance insights into system status, as well as easy access to devices level details.
• Web portals that provide on-demand access to reporting and alerts.
• Mobile applications that enable the delivery of alerts to administrators’ preferred mobile devices, so team members can stay on top of system status, wherever they happen to be located.

5. Offer simple SaaS delivery

The more up-front cost and deployment time associated with a solution, the longer it will take for your customer to see its return on investment. To maximize the return on their next-generation power monitoring investments, it is critical that your clients leverage solutions based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models.

This eliminates the cost and effort associated with licensing, installing and wiring on-premises monitoring infrastructures- or with hiring a vendor’s professional services team to make all this happen. By leveraging SaaS offerings, organizations can shift capital expenses to operating expenses and pay-as-you-go models. Further, these monitoring services should include features like easy, self-service, wizard-driven installation.

A lot rides on an organization’s power structure. Unplanned events and outages can have a devastating impact on a business, posing the risk of missed SLAs, lost productivity, financial penalties, brand damage and lost customers. To optimize power infrastructure, IT teams need a robust next-generation monitoring service — one that delivers a holistic approach comprised of monitoring and reporting software, services and on-site technical support.

Art Mulligan is a product manager for UPS service, in Eaton’s Critical Power Systems Division in Raleigh, NC. Mulligan has had various marketing roles for Eaton, and has specialized in service marketing since 2002. Prior to Eaton he was in sales, advertising, product management, and marketing in software, telecommunications and service companies.  He has a B.A. in Economics and Management from Albion College.