The 5 Reasons to Avoid Free Power Monitoring Software

Do you need software you can use to monitor power across your network? A power outage at one of your mission-critical sites can leave you with giant labor costs, lost revenue, and tons of angry customers. It's absolutely essential that you have the right monitoring software to keep you on top of your network.

Not all power monitoring software is the same. Many are often tempted by the allure of free monitoring software, only to eventually learn the hard way. Free power monitoring software may seem like a no-brainer way to save money, but it will end up costing you more in the end.

Using free software just won't cut it: you need results. Here are 5 reasons to avoid using free power monitoring software:

1. Incomplete and unintelligible alarm descriptions - Just because your software was free doesn't mean it won't come with associated costs. Free solutions don't track and report the location, severity, timestamp, and details of individual alarms - leaving you guessing about the true nature of what's going on. This forces you to keep a detailed list, so you can reference your list to figure out what "Alarm 1672 is set" means. With a lack of detail, you'll never know if this is a simple status update that requires no action, or a serious potentially damaging problem. You can slowly waste expensive labor time, or even miss a major problem by using free software.
2. No Graphical Alarm Display (GUI) - A free power monitoring software solution will likely just give you a list of alarms and nothing more. Managing your alarm network using a graphical interface - compared to text only management - is a night-and-day difference. Understanding alarms and training new staff members is so much easier when you can see their geographic locations, floor plans, and actual photos of equipment and operations. An intuitive GUI can make your job so much easier.
3. No detail logs - If you have multiple users managing your alarms, you'll need a log to see who has done what. Using software that wasn't designed to support multiple users causes problems very quickly. The right power monitoring software can show you who did what and when, so you can always figure out who "dropped the ball." If you use the wrong monitoring system, your guess is as good as anybody's.
4. No user-level permissions - You don't want new employees, or employees who aren't ready to manage your alarms, to have full access to configure and mess up your monitoring system. A good power monitoring software will grant you different level of permissions, so you can control which users are allowed to manage your alarms. Once an employee gains enough experience and deserves more responsibility, for example, you can give them more privileges to work with your alarms.
5. No industrial-grade durability - Free power monitoring software will have to run on your own hardware. In all likelihood, that's a consumer-grade PC that isn't on an ideally stable operating system. Can you afford to trust your mission-critical alarms on a platform that's vulnerable to viruses and hackers? The right monitoring solution will run on an ultra-stable operating platform on rugged industrial-grade hardware. Your operations are valuable, so only trust them to equipment that's built to last.

You really can't afford to trust your critical operations to free software you downloaded online. Choosing the right power monitoring system is the difference between crippling outages and network uptime.

This free guide can help get you started on choosing the right power monitoring solution. With this guide you'll learn...

• The 5 key steps to SNMP implementation...
• How controlled SNMP migration and protocol mediation can modernize your network...
• Understand the 4 Most Common SNMP pitfalls - and how to avoid them...

To speak with a power monitoring expert, call 1-800-693-0351 or send an email to sales@dpstele.com. The DPS Telecom experts can help design the right system to fit your exact needs.