Data Center Power Monitoring: What Data Should You Monitor?

Leveraging data to enable more informed data center power management is critical for maintaining uptime, increasing energy efficiency, increasing power capacity utilization, and reducing costs.

Understanding which power metrics to monitor is the first step towards smarter data center operations. By keeping a close eye on key metrics such as current, voltage, active power, apparent power, and energy consumption, data center managers can gain valuable insights into their power usage patterns and identify opportunities for improvement.

In this blog post, we will explore the key power data you should monitor in your data center and discuss how to effectively gather and utilize this information to improve data center operations.

What Power Data Should You Monitor in Your Data Center?

Some of the key power metrics you should monitor to support more intelligent data center management include:

• Current (A). Monitoring the current at the rack is essential to ensure that the current remains within safe limits, preventing circuit breaker trips. In a three-phase power system, it is important to track the load across all phases to maintain balanced power distribution, which helps prolong equipment life.
• Voltage (V). Tracking the voltage at the rack helps ensure it remains within acceptable limits. Over-voltage or under-voltage conditions can potentially damage sensitive equipment. Maintaining stable voltage is critical for the reliable operation of data center infrastructure.
• Active power (W). Active power measures the real-time power consumption of the devices connected to the rack PDU. Understanding the actual power requirements of your equipment is crucial for accurate capacity management and avoiding overload situations.
• Apparent power (kVA). Apparent power represents the total power supplied to a rack, including both active power and reactive power. Monitoring apparent power helps you understand the overall power demand and assess power quality.
• Energy consumption (kWh). Tracking cumulative energy usage over time provides insights into trends and efficiencies. This data helps in identifying periods of high consumption and can guide efforts to reduce energy waste, allocate costs accurately, and plan for future energy needs.

How Can You Monitor Power in Your Data Center?

First, you must instrument your data center with power meters that will provide the data points listed above.

Outlet-metered intelligent rack PDUs provide granular device- and rack-level power data that drives deeper insights about the data center infrastructure. Power tap boxes, branch circuit breakers, UPS units, and building power meters may also be instrumented.

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software collects, stores, reports, and alerts on the data generated by intelligent rack PDUs and other sources, transforming the raw data into actionable insights that improve uptime, efficiency, and productivity.

What Can You Do With Data Center Power Data?

Data center power monitoring with outlet-metered intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software supports:

Better uptime.

Proactively managing your data center helps maintain uptime with:

• Thresholds and alerts. Setting warning and critical thresholds on rack, inlet, and circuit breaker loads, and three-phase balance generates alerts when thresholds are exceeded. These alerts enable you to immediately investigate and remediate potential issues such as overloaded circuits before they escalate into serious problems that can cause downtime.
• Failover simulations. Identify which cabinets are at risk of being outside of your power redundancy requirements in the event that a power circuit fails and make appropriate changes to the loads of these cabinets to ensure IT equipment won’t be impacted in a failover scenario.
• Health polling. The software polls intelligent rack PDUs at user-configurable intervals to ensure that they can be reached. If they are unreachable, an alert is automatically generated.

Increased energy efficiency.

More informed energy management drives reduced energy consumption via:

• Ghost server reports. Ghost servers are idle servers that consume power without contributing to the data center’s workload. A built-in report lists all your potential ghost servers based on their load. Investigating and decommissioning the ghost servers reduces energy waste.
• Energy consumption reports. Report on how much energy is being used across different sites and by various customers or business units. This granular level of reporting helps you identify high-energy usage areas and implement targeted strategies to reduce consumption.
• IT efficiency comparisons. Track the energy consumption at the device level to compare their energy efficiency. This information can be leveraged for more informed energy management decisions such as virtualizing and consolidating equipment or upgrading inefficient equipment.
• Automatic PUE calculations. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is one of the most popular metrics for tracking overall data center energy efficiency. DCIM software can automatically calculate and trend the PUE for all your sites so you can see the impact of your energy efficiency initiatives.

Improved power utilization.

Intelligent power capacity planning drives higher utilization of existing power capacity via:

• Stranded power capacity reporting. DCIM software offers a variety of ways to identify and recover stranded capacity, including an out-of-the-box dashboard chart for stranded power capacity per rack and visual analytics overlaid on a 3D floor map of your data center that color-codes your racks based on their power capacity and usage.
• What-if analysis. What-if analysis helps you visualize the impact planned projects will have on your rack power capacity. With this information, you will know if you can use existing resources for future deployments.
• Automatic device power budgeting. Instead of derating nameplate values, automatically set highly accurate power budgets for each server in your data center based on their actual load. This lets you know if you can deploy additional servers using your existing rack space and power resources. Enterprise telecommunications companies like Comcast leverage this feature to achieve a 40% increase in the utilization of their existing resources.
• Building-to-chip power capacity management. DCIM software provides built-in intelligence on the power capacity and usage at every hop in your power circuits, from the building level down to individual servers. By monitoring and managing power loads, three-phase power distribution, circuit breaker states, and ensuring redundancy requirements are met at all levels of the data center, you can maximize power capacity utilization.

Cost savings.

Power monitoring enables actionable insights that save money by:

• Eliminating energy waste. Finding and shutting down ghost servers, remotely turning off outlets when devices aren’t in use, and encouraging more efficient behavior with accurate customer billback reports help to reduce energy consumption.
• Deferring capital expenditures. Identify and use stranded power capacity to delay large capital expenditures for new data centers.
• Managing power in a colocation data center. Monitor energy usage to optimize the utilization of existing power circuits without overprovisioning, validate power charges from colocation providers to ensure you are billed for your actual usage, and prevent peak load surcharges during periods of high demand.
• Extending equipment lifespan. Report on your three-phase power load and receive alerts when phases are out of balance to maintain balance and improve the efficiency of power distribution and prolong the lifespan of equipment.

Bringing It All Together

Data center power monitoring is crucial for improving data center operations. By continuously tracking key power data, you can gain valuable insights and identify areas for improvement. Leveraging intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software transforms raw data into actionable insights, leading to better uptime, increased energy efficiency, and improved power utilization.

Want to see how Sunbird’s world-leading DCIM software provides complete data center power monitoring? Get your free test drive now.