A Quantitative Comparison of UPS Monitoring and Servicing Approaches Across Edge Environments

UPSs must be managed properly over their lifecycle in order to do the job for which they were intended – to keep critical systems up and running. When a company has UPSs distributed across dozens, hundreds or even more edge computing sites, managing the fleet often becomes challenging. This is primarily because (1) the sites are likely to be geographically dispersed, (2) there is a lack of trained and/or dedicated staff on each site, and (3) the UPSs vary in age across sites.

There are two core functions of effective UPS fleet management:

• Monitoring – Most UPSs today can be proactively monitored through either on-premise software or cloud-based apps. UPSs log activity, report problems, and tell you when batteries, which are consumable parts, are near the end of their life. Proactive monitoring is essential for maintaining high availability.
• Servicing – There are two general reasons for maintenance activities – (1) proactive or preventive maintenance, where the system is serviced ahead of failures to reduce the likelihood of unplanned downtime and (2) reactive or break/fix maintenance where work is done once a problem is detected in order to make it operational again.