Home Solutions UPS Monitoring Service

Ensuring the fail-safe is safe and won't fail

You have a UPS to make sure your data centre isn’t disrupted. But how often do you check it? How often do you make sure the equipment you rely on to stop disruptions won’t cause them?

Our UPS monitoring service provides the meaningful reports you need to continually assess the health of your UPS. As a result you can proactively make the right decisions and ensure your UPS is ready to protect your data centre whenever it’s needed.

What we monitor and why

1.Temperature – overheating can cause batteries to fail, which are expensive to replace and not covered by warranty.

2.Phase Health – constant fluctuations in input phase indicate there is a problem with the electric supply. It could mean that your electricity supplier or the building has faulty cables.

3.Load – if load exceeds capacity, turning the servers on could trip the UPS. This is expensive, because you have to buy equipment urgently, at premium prices, to solve a problem.

4.Battery status – when one battery is lost in a redundant system, it is often not noticed until the second battery fails and the UPS can’t deliver the service it has been designed for.

5.Battery condition – without monitoring it is impossible to know whether batteries need replacing or to be sure that they will give the run time you expect.

6.Server connectivity – if the UPS isn’t actually connected to the servers they won’t shut down cleanly and, if they don’t, restores could take an awfully long time.

7.Server room environment – by monitoring temperature and humidity within the room, as well as the temperature and fan speeds of other IT components, we get more accurate results ensuring we only alert you when action needs to be taken.
 

The price of failure

A council Head of IT had a UPS failure and discovered just how disruptive and expensive not monitoring his UPS could be.

The IT department was in the middle of a system upgrade and resources were stretched. The data centre was air-conditioned but the UPS vents became blocked. As a result, the UPS overheated and all the batteries failed. Apart from the down time that was caused, the batteries were expensive to replace.

A simple, proactive monitoring solution would have brought the problem to his attention, saving downtime and replacement costs.