Why do I care about SNMP?
I care about SNMP because I want to manage everything from a central location. We use MyView in Scrutinizer. From a central location, we can monitor the network, the call center and, if we wanted to, the coffee pot.

BTW: Fugoo is considering a marketing plan for their network connected coffee maker, however, it lacks support for SNMP and the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

Come to find out, the best idea for coffee pot monitoring is a simple web camera.

SNMP Temperature Monitoring
We monitor temperature in our data rooms, call center, conference rooms and offices, and we do it all with our temperature sensors. We even put an airflow sensor in our HVAC air intake to monitor when the blower came on. I then polled for the SNMP information with Denika and produced historical trends with the data.

Summary
When we’re looking at hardware, equipment that supports SNMP generally makes it to our short list. All of our equipment supports SNMP.

- Mike

You’ve probably already placed UPS devices at the appropriate positions within the data center; which is the first step to protecting your investment. But if the power fails in the middle of the night and your UPS kicks in to keep your vital equipment running, how long will the battery backup keep your servers up and running, or better yet, your air conditioners and HVAC systems?

With the Ravica AC Voltage Detector, you can receive alerts when your systems switch to battery backup. Knowing immediately when your equipment is no longer running on line voltage can mean having the extra time to get a generator up and running or the core power issue resolved before batteries run out of juice and other systems begin to fail.

Temperature can even come back to bite us in this scenario. If your data room isn’t getting the proper cooling and ventilation, because the air conditioners or HVAC systems are no longer operational, you are now not only contending with power failures, but data center hot spots and equipment overheating as well.

The AC Voltage Detector is a simple sensor that works with any of the Ravica SensorProbe models. It detects voltage at 50 VAC to 250 VAC and runs on a open/closed contact switch system. You simply plug the cable into your UPS, like you would with any other piece of hardware. When the sensor detects the presence of line voltage, it reports a NORMAL status. When the power fails and the UPS switches itself on, the sensor automatically detects the change and reports an ALARM status.

Perhaps not every scenario calls for that extra line of defense, but when you consider the cost of data room equipment and the potential cost of that equipment’s failure, some extra measures to ensure its stability just make sense.

~ Jon Mills
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