Rupert Power

Open source monitoring of APC Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs)

This is a system I built to monitor the power status and environmental conditions of five UPSs (it's an addiction), located in the house I live in and a separate garage building nearby. What you see here is the publicly available monitoring side of the system. As a whole, the system has two main purposes. The first is to isolate my equipment - consisting of computer systems, routers, network switches, my server, test gear, and lighting - from unstable power conditions, that inevitably come about in a rural setting and particularly affect us as we're on the end of a long feeder. The nearest substation is quite some distance away, meaning there are a lot of trees to fall on the line along the way. And, with climate change and new weather extremes, we don't expect that this problem will go away any time soon either - even lines company Vector admits to their shareholders.

The second goal of this system is to provide me with logging of power events such as outages, and data logging of all recorded parameters, as well as the ability to control and shut down the UPSs remotely, schedule shutdowns, cancel scheduled shutdowns, change UPS settings, and so forth. You can't access that part. At least, I hope not :)

The system consists of uninterruptible power supplies made by APC, which have APC network management cards installed or are connected via USB, and uses the open source UPS monitoring software APCUPSD. Although this software is now somewhat out of date, it works very well for this purpose and is on the read-only side of the system, so it doesn't pose a direct security risk. The structure and content of the monitoring screens you see are produced by APCUPSD - I did not write this software, what I did was write the CSS that formats the page into what you see, and the JavaScript that updates it in real time, corrects several errors produced by APCUPSD, and provides the requested detail pages on demand. The CSS also uses nth-child selectors to hide some information on small screens to produce a reduced mobile device friendly version of the status page.

You can view this system and all the data in real time at the link above. If you're lucky enough you might see a power outage, AVR (automatic voltage regulation) operation, or error conditions which are usually due to me shutting something down for maintenance.

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