[Nut-upsuser] Nut and UPSes+ATSes

[Jim Klimov]

Hello Harlan,

  While NUT can be used to monitor and maybe manage compatible ATS/STS
devices, it may be up to some other solution around it to provide a "more
comprehensive operational functionality" especially for larger device
population and complex topologies. It also depends on the definition of
such functionality and the goals you want to achieve (yours outlined in the
other thread).

  Sometimes it suffices to set up a web of `upsmon` clients to `MONITOR`
UPS and ATS states, perhaps forwarding that information to `upssched` and
*its* hook scripts to delay some decisions (e.g. ignore short-lived
outages, or require a shutdown after some time on battery regardless of
battery being full enough, or somehow aggregate knowledge that "if ATS is
powered by the input coming from UPS1, we care about UPS1's alarms to gauge
health of PSU2 of this bigger server"), if we stay within the NUT-provided
ecosystem for this. Indeed, many users have tailored scripts and `upsmon`
configurations for their set-ups, which use NUT for device interactions but
logic and knowledge of who is "fed" by whom and how to react to different
situations are externalized.

  I must acknowledge that there are also vendor-backed solutions, including
some built on top of NUT, like the Eaton Intelligent Power Manager Editions
(IPM2) which I used to work on some years ago (and which got me into NUT
team and eventually maintainership), and is a mix of open-source core seen
fresh at https://github.com/42ity and somewhat stale at http://42ity.org/,
and proprietary parts for UI and some vendor integrations, including VM
engines e.g. to reduce battery power draw by shutting down lower-priority
VMs and aggregate the survivors on fewer physical boxes. It does take
advantage of many Eaton hardware features, some developed hand-in-hand with
the software team, but remains open to working with other vendors as much
as NUT supports that. It is a good example of such externalized logic and
knowledge mentioned above. If you have a (small-to-medium sized?)
datacenter with complex power topologies that change in real time,
https://www.eaton.com/in/en-us/catalog/backup-power-ups-surge-it-power-distribution/eaton-intelligent-power-manager-.html
may be worth a look.

Hope this helps,
Jim Klimov


On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 8:08 AM Harlan Stenn via Nut-upsuser <
nut-upsuser at alioth-lists.debian.net> wrote:

> Is there any documentation somewhere about how NUT can incorporate
> automatic transfer switches into its monitoring and operational
> framework to provide more comprehensive operational functionality?
>
> H
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nut-upsuser mailing list
> Nut-upsuser at alioth-lists.debian.net
> https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nut-upsuser
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/nut-upsuser/attachments/20240731/d233c6df/attachment-0001.htm>