Re: [E-impact] [OPSAWG] [IVY] side meeting #119: Power Metrics: concrete usage example

[Simon Leinen <[e-mail]>]

Jan Lindblad (jlindbla) writes:
> There are a number of us IETF participants, from a rather long list of
> equipment providers as well as operators, that are working on solving
> very concrete and current issues with respect to energy management in
> network equipment. For example, we have noted that most devices can
> report their energy and/or power usage, but they all do that in
> different ways and with different precision. We see a real need to
> standardize this, in order to realize use cases many operators are
> asking for, somewhat urgently.

As an operator, I can second this.

We are adding continuous and consistent power consumption monitoring
across our fleet of routers.  Most of them expose their overall energy
consumption (as well as that of some components) via the wonderful
ENTITY-MIB/ENTITY-SENSOR-MIB or close vendor-specific cousins of those.

But (even within one vendor) the representation of these sensors varies
widely, which makes it complicated to (a) locate the relevant/best
sensors and (b) deal with the different representations - some devices
have separate volt/ampere sensors, others have watts, some measure
performance into the PSU, some out of, some both.  Not to mention funny
bugs, e.g. claiming the power sensor is in "dBm" units where the values
clearly indicate Watts (280 dBm aren't really plausible :-).

It's painful and already cost me a lot of time, which leads me to
suspect that router power consumption is not widely monitored in the
industry (I could be wrong though, maybe people use other methods).
-- 
Simnon.