What are some effective tools for monitoring energy usage and environmental impact?

If you’re willing to invest a week or so, you could set up a Grafana dashboard with SNMP monitors. This would provide a nice interface where you can stream in specific SNMP OIDs to track power usage. Plus, you can use it for other monitoring tasks, like checking if servers are online or bandwidth usage on switches. It’s a tough setup, but totally worth it in the long run.

There are definitely ways to monitor energy usage at a business level, although most of the common tools are aimed at residential setups. For a data center, I’d recommend looking into rack power strips that come with built-in energy monitoring. APC is a solid brand to consider. You can then tie this back to a server to visualize the data over time. If you're a smaller company, creating a custom solution could be feasible, but for larger spaces, go for something already on the market.

What you need is an Energy Performance Management System (EPMS), but setting one up can be a bit challenging. I found an open-source option called OpenEMS that might work for you. While this might be more than what you need, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Talk to your facilities team about implementing a building management system. Sometimes you can get funding for it! It's a bit of a learning curve, but it's fascinating work and you'll gain a lot of insights as you dive deeper. Check out Siemens or Schneider Electric for tools that could help.

You can calculate your efficiency using the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric. I track power usage on my incoming power line using a P1 meter, and I’m also hooked into an EATON system for SNMP monitoring. This way, I can analyze how much energy is consumed by the data center as well as other components like cooling and lighting. If you have solar power, you need to factor that in too!