apc

APC InRow A/C error monitoring with PRTG

APC InRow A/C error monitoring with PRTG

It is rather hard to get valuable alarm monitoring from an APC InRow air conditioning unit. The APC A/C’s are a real pain when it comes to this, it might even be that this same principle applies to APC UPS units, but I did not have yet time to test this out.

What I really wanted is a way to monitor alerts that the unit reports. Doing so seemed to be fine with a simple SNMP sensor in PRTG but the real challenge was getting the alert text. Now, there are SNMP channels but they are only available when an alert is ongoing, meaning when there is no alert status the whole OID fails.

To compensate this, I ended up writing a simple PowerShell script that interprets the SNMP OID results, even ignores a certain failure cause I didn’t care about it, and reports back the results as a total error count (set the channel to ErrorLimit = 0 in PRTG) and if there are Errors it will write them to the text.

This is an Advanced EXE script that needs to reside in the following path:

It expects the parameters for community and IP-Address

The results of the script will always hold the top 4 error messages, but it will exclude the phrase “No Backup Units Available Alarm” from the error count – cause in certain setups like hours there are multiple units but they are not necessarily clustered – this is not a full alarm rather then a warning in my case. Feel free to adjust this in the script if you want to raise the error. You could simply remove / remark the following line:

Here a picture of a real world alarm respective issue with the APC InRow A/C in PRTG generated by the script

APC network cards – fix logon issues

APC network cards – fix logon issues

APC network cards – or the NIC of many APC devices like UPS and A/C – possibly even NetBotz (APC – aka. Schneider Eletric) tend to have an issue that the system is telling you in the browser that there is already a session active.

The reason is that they tend to keep the session online forever, if you don’t click on logoff before you close your browser etc.

What you will see is an error like this after you entered your valid credentials:

Notice
Someone is currently logged into the APC Management Web Server.

Please try again late

It is actually pretty easy to bypass this – you either use TELNET or SSH to logon to the system with the same credentials and then simply logout there.

While doing so – you logoff the user and you will be able to logon again.