Is there some software available to centrally manage APC IP enabled PDUs?

apcapcupsdippower-distribution-unit

I am not looking for a recommendation of which one to use, just an answer as the whether anything to do this exists. We have a few dozen AP7921 & similar units that until now we have managed on an idivudual basis. Already collect power usage info using SNMP & Cacti but I want to know; is there any software available (Open Source, Free or Commercial) that would allow me to manage and configure a few dozen of these devices?

At a minimum I would like to be able to see the state of and switch ports. Even better if I can see the labels and update port names. Better still if most of the switches configurable items could be played with from a single pane of glass, as they say.

Looking around the www and on serverfault I can see that a few people suggest OpenNMS for monitoring. It does not look like that will give me more than Read access though?

I have also started looking into apcupsd but that looks more geared towards controlling UPS systems, so I am unsure if it is suitable for multiport PDUs.

Any reports of success doing the above, software to investigate and so forth are welcome as comments. Please only put an answer if you can confirm that "Yes, such software exists" (even better if you can tell me what). I have already spent a few hours digging around without much success, I am clearly using a wrong keyword somewhere as I cannot believe that nothing exists to do this,.

Best Answer

All you need is an SNMP client and the PowerNet MIB from APC and you can do what you want. At $oldjob, I had written a perl script that could switch/powercycle based on computer names, it was basically reading port mappings from a database and sending SNMP commands to the appropriate unit and took just a few hours to write.