How to Use the Power Consumption Collection Feature in System Center Essentials

[This is prerelease documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

With Essentials, you can now collect information about the power being used by computers in your monitoring environment. You can generate reports that provide detailed information about how much power is used in your environment. For example, you can generate reports that include the power consumption data for each computer or the overall power consumption for a group of computers.

The following procedure describes how to define the information that you want to collect for power management.

Note
Before you can use the power consumption collection feature, you must to import the Power Management Library management pack.

To set up a collection of power consumption information

Create an Essentials group that contains the computers that are attached to a power distribution unit (PDU). For information about how to create a group, see How to Create Groups in System Center Essentials.
In the Essentials console, click the Authoring navigation button to open the Authoring workspace.
In the Authoring workspace, start the Add Monitoring wizard.
On the Select Monitoring Type page, in the Select the monitoring type box, select Power Consumption, and then click Next.

Type a name for the power set that you are defining, select a management pack, and then click Next.

Note
You can either select a management pack from the Select destination management pack list or create a new unsealed management pack by clicking New. By default, when you create a management pack object, disable a rule or monitor, or create an override, Essentials saves the setting to the default management pack. As a best practice, you should create a separate management pack for power consumption collection, rather than saving your customized settings to the default management pack. For more guidelines, see Default Management Pack.

Note

You can either select a management pack from the Select destination management pack list or create a new unsealed management pack by clicking New. By default, when you create a management pack object, disable a rule or monitor, or create an override, Essentials saves the setting to the default management pack. As a best practice, you should create a separate management pack for power consumption collection, rather than saving your customized settings to the default management pack. For more guidelines, see Default Management Pack.

Under Total power capacity, specify the maximum power capacity (in kilowatts) for the PDU that provides power to the computers that you specified in step 1.
Under Power Budget, specify the power budget (the maximum amount of power available) for the power set. You can either specify a percentage of all available power or an absolute number of kilowatts. Click Next.
Under Devices in the power set, click Browse to search for the Essentials group that you defined in step 1.
Under Additional power consumption, provide the total power consumption (in kilowatts) for any computers that are attached to the PDU but that are not monitored by Essentials. Click Next.
Review the details of the collection, and then click Create.