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Monitoring and Capping Power in Data Center
8 Overall Best Practices for OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager
For more information about using REST APIs, refer to OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager REST API
Guide.
2.1.2 Analyzing Historical data
This section describes how to use the historical graphs to identify the anomalies and identify the optimal
power cap value for the devices and groups. After 7 days of monitoring, select a device for which you want to
identify the anomalies.
1. Click the device and navigate to Power Management and Monitoring tab.
2. Select the duration as 7 days from the drop-down list.
3. Analyze the graph and identify the time frames where there is a spike in power consumption and
where there is a dip in the consumption.
• It is important to identify if the power consumption is periodically maximum at certain times.
- If the increase in power consumption is periodic in nature, investigate whether a workload is
causing this increase in consumption.
For example, the power consumption is at 150W from Monday to Friday between 2PM to 4PM.
But at other durations, the power consumption stays at 130W. This would indicate an increase in
system workload during this time duration.
- If the increase in power consumption is not periodic in nature and is due to a workload, you can
apply a power cap value in the range of 125-140 Watts so that there is no impact on the
performance of the system. Consider this value as InitialCapValue.
- If the high-power consumption is not associated with any system workload, then investigate
further to identify the root cause.
• Identify the timeframe where power consumption is minimum and note down this value.
- You need to analyze this further to find the reason for the low power consumption.
For example, since it is a weekend, the servers are not in use or the workload running on them is
minimal, but the devices cannot be powered off. In such cases, you can apply a power cap value
corresponding to the lower bound value for the server.
4. Repeat the above steps for all the devices and groups.
2.2 Creating Static Power Policies
This section describes how to create Static Power Policies.
1. Navigate to Power Management Policies section.
2. Select Create option. This launches the Create Policy wizard.
3. Provide an appropriate name for the policy.
4. After selecting the device, navigate to Policy Settings section.
• Power consumption is maximum during a certain time
a. In this case, provide the power cap value as InitialCapValue that is identified in the Analyzing
Historical data section.
b. The Policy Settings section lists the Lower Bound and Upper Bound values for the device.
c. Check whether InitialCapValue is in the range of the Lower and Upper Bound values. If yes,
provide the cap value as the InitialCapValue (for example, 130Watts).