You'll have to excuse me if I'm re-inventing the wheel here; I'm new to the list, but I've been using SA for over a year now. I've been assembling a new server rack with new APC UPSes, and I'm just not satisfied with the monitoring options either through Windows or PowerChute Personal--and there's no way am I spending MORE money just to monitor $3000 worth of UPSes, so PC Business and the various network cards are not an option. I thought that Servers Alive would be a great tool for monitoring them, but I couldn't find anybody that had written a COM check that worked with UPSes.
So I wrote one myself. I've been testing it today on my own, but now I'd like to get it out into the world for some real life testing. I've been testing under SA v5, but I believe it should work under V4 as well. I've also only tested on new APC UPSes--it should work for just about any serial APC ups, but I'm not sure. The installation package doesn't yet write out the necessary registry entries to make SA recognize it, so you'll need to do that manually. Other than that, it should be pretty self explanatory.
My goal was to write something simple that SA could use to check on a serial APC UPS and alert me if something goes wrong. My default setup right now has two entries--the first is the main check, and it checks whether or not the UPS is online (running on external power). Any other status will result in a check "fail" and mark the entry as down--alerting me of a power outage. I then have another entry, dependent on the first and only checked if the first is marked as down. This second entry checks the estimated runtime of the UPS, and will run an external EXE as an alert that will shut down all servers cleanly if that runtime falls below a certain threshold.
The module will also check load on the UPS, input and output voltage, and battery life remaining (as a %).
If you are interested in helping me test, and have the time and equipment to dedicate to testing it, please let me know either directly or via the list.
