Something's wrong! Find out immediately using EMX Policies and Alerts

Circuit aproaching overload? Intake temperature way too high? When something is going wrong in your data center, you need to be notified immediately. Packet Power's EMX Energy Portal application makes this easy even for very large monitoring networks. In fact, EMX offers two types of realtime alerts -- Policies and Alerts. Here's when to use one versus the other.

Both Policies and Alerts deliver realtime notifications when conditions you want to maintain no longer exist or when conditions occur that you want to avoid.  The primary difference between them is that a Policy can be created once and applied across a large number of units. Alerts are created and applied at the individual monitoring unit.

When to use a Policy
Use a Policy when you want the same parameters to apply to a large number of units, avoiding the need to set the same alert 1,000 times for 1,000 monitoring units. Because Policies can be set on either relative or absolute values, one Policy such as "current should not exeed 40% of the circuit capacity" can cover both 20 Amp and 60 Amp circuits. Policies are set at the room and cabinet levels, one rule can take care of all the circuits in a room. You can opt out of a policy at the room or rack level if you need to set a different condition for a subset of racks or if you are performing maintenance and don’t want to get notifications of power or temperature fluctuations during the maintenance period.

When to use an Alert
Alerts are defined monitoring unit by monitoring unit and are best used in small implementations or to set a unique condition for a specific monitoring unit within a larger group. 

Both Policies and Alerts are defined in your Power Manager software and feature:

• Flexible rules based on a range of power, temperature and temporal factors
• Real­time notifications via email or SMS
• Five levels of criticality ratings
• Notifications when the violation occurs and when the condition returns to normal
• Reminder notifications to designated personnel until the issue has been resolved

Packet Power’s Policies and Alerts make it easy to define and administer notifications on power and environmental criteria for a single device, a collection of cabinets or across an entire data center. Knowing how to use them will help you effectively manage your data center operations.

Email support@packetpower.com for help setting up Policies and Alerts in your facility.