We use PredictPulse to sustain our data centers.
Eaton PredictPulse offers real-time notifications, detailed reports on UPS status, and power metrics. It ensures efficiency through predictive insights, enhancing maintenance and troubleshooting for reliable performance.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Eaton PredictPulse | 17.8% |
| Raritan Power IQ | 23.3% |
| Vertiv Environet Alert | 18.1% |
| Other | 40.8% |
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Jul 8, 2026 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vertiv Environet Alert | 4.5 | 18.1% | 100% | 1 interviewAdd to research |
| Raritan Power IQ | 3.0 | 23.3% | 0% | 1 interviewAdd to research |
Designed for critical environments, Eaton PredictPulse provides real-time notifications for UPS status changes and power issues, assisting organizations in monitoring remote locations and maintaining power continuity. Features like automatic alerts via email and text streamline maintenance efforts, while a web interface and event viewer support data monitoring and compliance. Despite its benefits, users suggest improvements in monitoring setup, notification systems, and data-analysis features. PredictPulse's predictive insights and quick technician response bolster informed decision-making and reliability, critical for environments such as 911 centers and data centers.
What are the important features of Eaton PredictPulse?Industries such as emergency services and data centers implement Eaton PredictPulse to monitor UPS systems for critical alerts and preventive maintenance. It supports remote location management, helping reduce downtime and extend the life of UPS deployments across large facilities.
Eaton PredictPulse was previously known as PredictPulse.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Systems Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees | 5.0 | I find PredictPulse highly stable and reliable, ensuring 100% data center uptime for years. Eaton's proactive monitoring and 10/10 support are excellent. While alerts lack detail, I highly recommend it and Eaton's exclusive maintenance. |
| Automation Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | I find Eaton PredictPulse vital for proactive UPS monitoring. It prevents costly shutdowns with instant alerts, saving significant time by eliminating manual checks, and offers excellent ROI. Setup was an IT hurdle, but the solution is highly reliable. |
| Manager at LA METRO | 4.5 | Eaton PredictPulse remotely monitors our critical UPS units, significantly reducing maintenance manpower with instant notifications and detailed reports. I find it stable, scalable, and invaluable for ensuring our emergency systems' reliability, despite its proprietary nature. |
| Electrical and Instrumentation Technician at Marathon Petroleum Corporation | 4.5 | I'm very happy with Eaton PredictPulse. It greatly reduces troubleshooting time and prevents costly downtime by quickly identifying UPS issues. Setup was easy, and support is excellent. I highly recommend it for its efficiency and remote monitoring capabilities. |
| Field Service Technician at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees | 5.0 | I find Eaton PredictPulse and UPS reliable, providing crucial reports and 24/7 monitoring for our CT machine. It significantly saves money and time by ensuring uptime, and support has been excellent, even with minor setup hurdles. |
| System Engineer at a government with 1-10 employees | 4.5 | I rely on Eaton's PredictPulse for critical UPS alerting and resilience in our 911 center, preventing downtime. Its email alerts are invaluable, though I wish for better email segregation and more configuration options to reduce alert spam. |
| Facility Manager at a hospitality company with 501-1,000 employees | 5.0 | I use Eaton PredictPulse for casino power, preventing game reboots and saving time. Its real-time alerts are invaluable for offsite monitoring. While stable and reliable, I suggest simplifying the remote monitoring dashboard's presentation for clarity. |
| Information Technology Infrastructure Manager at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees | 5.0 | I highly recommend PredictPulse for its invaluable power outage alerts, saving us $10,000 monthly and providing great stability. Initial email security issues were a challenge during setup, but the support and ROI make it worthwhile. |
| Data Center Manager at Travelport | 4.0 | I use PredictPulse for Eaton UPS monitoring; it automatically triggers service calls, making my life easier. While support is great, I wish the daily email notifications were modernized with more efficient communication like SMS. |
| Senior Manager at Kaiser Permanente | 3.5 | I value Eaton SecureConnect for preventing UPS failures and its excellent support. I'd like more customizable alerts, historical data access, and better scalability for large deployments, plus easier user management. |
We use PredictPulse to sustain our data centers.
We're not awake 24/7, so it's good to have somebody else receiving data constantly. A few times, I've gotten a call from Eaton when they noticed abnormal data in our data center. They were dispatching one of our service reps, but I needed parts, so Eaton was given access to do what needed to be done before I even knew anything was wrong.
PredictPulse's reporting capabilities are pretty good. I like the web interface in PredictPulse. You can look at your policy in real-time and get an alert that tells you exactly where you are dropping power and if you're on bypass or not. If a module has gone bad, it tells you precisely what module and your risk capability. The PredictPulse usage gateway is pretty informative and gives you many options.
We use the PredictPulse interface for alerts, and it sends out remote notifications almost immediately after detecting any abnormalities. We get text and email alerts whenever something happens. It costs because we pay for 24-hour monitoring. They also send us emails almost at the same time, so we don't really need to use the mobile app.
We get the alerts almost instantaneously, but it doesn't give you as much information as the system notice. I don't know what the alert means. It's not really indicative of the problem because it's non-descriptive to us. Is there a problem, or is it only a standard utility blip for something?
We have two different data centers. We've been using PredictPulse in one data center for about 15 years and in the other for nearly 10.
PredictPulse has been pretty stable. Our older UPS was approaching the end of life. Eaton came by and upgraded all the hardware, so we could install the latest interface and use PredictPulse on it. We didn't even have to ask. It now has even more capabilities than the newer UPS in the other data center. The older one was more a text-based web interface. I have the same web interface running on the older UPS that I have on the newer one, and that's still relatively safe.
So far, the UPSes have never let us down. They're 100 percent reliable at supplying power to our equipment. We do make sure that we contact only Eaton for maintenance. This is because the third-party providers tend to use aftermarket parts, and we've been compromised before when we let a third party put second-hand batteries in the UPS. So that was able to convince our company leadership to go to Eaton for maintenance and support exclusively.
Occasionally, I take a look at PredictPulse's predictive analytics. We've had no downtime, thankfully. But it can tell me the age and the predicted lifespan of configured parts, like batteries and stuff like that. Then it gives me a heads up to notify my upper management that it is time to start thinking about replacing batteries or caps when needed. Those parts are replaced in addition to the regular maintenance that we perform on our Eaton every year.
I rate Eaton support 10 out of 10. They've been very supportive. One of our UPSes had an emergency install because the previous UPS burned out. The generators in the data center were down for three weeks. They bypassed installing an environmental module during that emergency install and just rushed to put the data center back on UPS power. Eaton detected that, shipped the parts to our location, and arranged to meet our engineer on site to install the module so they would still get reporting on the UPS.
Positive
We do have another data center, which was already equipped with two different names, we don't know their versions, so their UPSes, it's pretty stable as well. It just doesn't seem to have any much of a web interface as the Eaton does, but they're both equally stable and dependable.
Setting up PredictPulse is pretty straightforward. We assign an IP to the UPS, the engineer sets it all up, we log in, and it's live. Then we set up the remote notifications to the different responsible teams, and I activate PredictPulse on the web interface. That's about it on our side.
I have nothing to do with budgeting because I'm not on the financial side. I'm on the technical side, so that wouldn't apply to me. I don't say this is what I need, and this is the service I want. I don't want any aftermarket third-party services. The company paid whatever it costs, and they must be getting some kind of return because they keep renewing the license every year.
I rate PredictPulse 10 out of 10. The support and everything I've gotten from Eaton has been great. They're very reliable. You won't go down. I don't support third-party service because I've used another Eaton product and when the tech inspected it, he was like, "We don't know who installed that and that's why you dropped." After that, we replaced him with an Eaton service provider. Since then, we have never had an outage.
We get a monthly report, which is emailed to me from Eaton, with PredictPulse. We don't have software onsite. We just get the monthly report emailed to us. Then, I have the ability to use a web browser, like Microsoft Edge or Chrome, to dial into the IP address of the device and look at it.
We have 11 Eaton UPSs, which take on through controls equipment processes that basically cannot shut down. If they shut down, it gets extremely ugly, extremely quick. So, to prevent it from shutting them down, we have UPS systems which protect them and are scattered throughout our plant. It's a large physical facility, so we have 11 of them, and they are scattered throughout the plant.
The UPSs are very reliable. We're about to replace one that's 19 years-old. They've been using them longer than that, but the oldest one that we have is either a 2001 or 2003 model. However, at that difference, it's not that big a deal as far as electronic equipment goes.
The UPS, if they have a fault for any reason, it tells you. We have remote locations. Nobody goes in there on a frequent basis. So, it tells me, "Hey, you have a problem," without me having to jump in the truck (or on the bicycle) and ride over to the plant, checking them weekly or monthly, to see if they're good. I get instant analysis on things. If there is a critical fault, I know within seconds. I get an email saying, "Hey, you have a critical fault on this thing. Here is what your critical fault is." That is a huge advantage. If there are other issues that are not critical, like the temperature, that I don't need to fix immediately but do need to be fixed very soon, it gives me notice so I can get the issue resolved before we do have a power blip that shuts our process down. It provides a very valuable function, which is vital for me.
The solution has helped proactively mitigate risk of issues, such as thermal events, because they put temperature probes in all the UPS units. I get these all the time, and UPSs do not like extreme heat and neither does my other equipment that is in those rooms. So this helps me monitor the whole room. It isn't the UPS's fault that the AC went out, but it allows me to see that and notify people. People go to some of these rooms about once a month. You don't want your room at 100-plus degrees for over a month before somebody realizes it. So, it helps mitigate UPS and other issues.
I just got a handy dandy email telling me my control room is over temperature, which is endangering the UPS. Therefore, I know to call the HVAC guy to go out there and fix the air conditioning in that unit. It's a unit that nobody visits very often. If the air conditioner craps out, it could sit up there a couple of weeks at 140 degrees and nobody would know it. That could absolutely destroy a UPS and other equipment that is in there. I get automatic emails telling me, "Hey, this thing is at 95 degrees, and that equipment is not supposed to run at over about 75 degrees." That is a huge benefit of it right there.
Years ago, we had an issue. Somebody made a booboo. They wired a receptacle into the wrong panel. This is a receptacle that runs high energy power equipment. It would trip the UPS out. The UPS was no longer functioning because it drew so much amperage that the UPS tripped. That is not the UPS's fault. It is whomever wired it; a contractor got the wrong panel by accident. Therefore, our unit had no protection. If the power blips, even for a fraction of a second, the losses were in hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were not protected, but I got my handy dandy email that blipped, saying, "Hey, you got a fault on this thing." We kept getting faults, and I was finally able to figure out, "Hey, it's one of the contractors working with his power drill out there." We were able to figure it out because of the constant updates via email stating that, "We had a problem."
We get a lot of lightning storms. However, if the power would have blipped from a lightning storm, and the UPS had not been working, then it's an immediate six-figure loss. By having the emails coming to me, it told me the issue, then I was able to get it resolved before we lost power.
Another example: Something shorted out in our process. I didn't know what, and some people said, "Oh, this has happened several times recently." I was able to go back and look at the database, which is easy to pull up, as I can put in a date a year ago, and cycle through it really quick, and say, "No, there have been no extreme phase overloads in the last year, except the one that happened last Tuesday morning at 8:04 AM." That's helpful for me, having that database there, because I can pull and sort through to see if anything like that happened preceding the fault last Tuesday.
It tells me, "Hey, we had a problem." Last night, something happened at the power company substation, and I'm about ready to go to bed at about 10:38 PM, but I have all these emails. Uh-oh, we have power issues at the plant. I know we have power issues before they even have time to call me from the plant, and it's all over the plant. I'm going, "Okay that is the power company. That's not us." It lets us know so we can address the issue sooner rather than later.
If you're looking at power imbalances and stuff, you can look at your load, and go, "Oh, phase A is overloaded or phase B is underloaded." Then, during the shutdown, you can do stuff that balances the load more.
The main thing is just knowing ahead of time that there are issues. If the UPSs are in an office building where everybody is at, that is not that big a deal. However, when they are nearly a mile from my office and it's in a room that people very seldom go into, you have no idea and it is on a very important process. So, I get the emails, and if I need to, I can pull it up on the web browser and look at it. All of these features are very helpful.
If you have a fault, it will tell you what the fault is. Just like if you went out there remotely and looked at it. It gives you, e.g., lost source. This means I've lost my power coming into it.
The emails don't give you in-depth alarm notices, but they do give you enough. For example, if I get utility power missing, then I'm like, "Okay, that tells me, incoming power is gone." It allows us to hopefully get someone headed this way and get the issue resolved before the UPSs die and all the control systems go down.
They have redone the monthly report to make them easier to read through. They made it a little bit easier to go through and scan all of my UPSs into that report. The information is the same, but now it is easier to scan through.
I have been using it for three or four years.
The company has been using it for a while. They were using dial up modems to dial out and indicate they had issues with stuff, then they got it hooked up to Ethernet connections. This was before I started working here.
The stability has been very good. I have not had any issues with bogus or bad PredictPulse stuff. We have not had any downtime with it.
We have had issues where we lost a switch, but that is not PredictPulse. That's between PredictPulse and the UPS. It is also not the UPS's fault that a switch fails.
We have three replacement units that maybe coming online by the end of the year, if nothing goes wrong or changes.
There are a couple of other people besides me who can get the emails. There just three people who look at it. Two of them really don't look at it much. Mainly, it's just me looking at it.
We have 15 units onsite. Four of them are so old they aren't sending emails. Therefore, we have 11 units that are really receiving the full PredictPulse. Hopefully, three of those will get changed out this year, then we will have 14 units sending out PredictPulse reports every month with availability and stuff. However, that is just because they are very old. It is not worth trying to make those work at this point, as it's just me looking at it. There are electricians who go and fix electrical or power issues going to these things or I call the folks to fix the HVAC. I get the emails and notices, then schedule the electrician or technician to come in and work on them. This is just a small amount of my job. It is not a major thing on our part to manage it and keep up with it.
We are adding one more new UPS. I would like to get all 16 UPSs on PredictPulse. That would be something that we would like to do. That is the only increase that we're going to do. We just need it on all the machines. As we upgrade these old obsolete units, we'll get them on the network and should have all of that resolved. Hopefully, within a year, I will have all 16 units on PredictPulse.
The 24/7 monitoring is good. I don't know if it's as critical because I get the automatic emails. Typically, when they call and tell me, "Hey, you've got a problem," I'm like, "I've already have an email." However, sometimes during the middle of the night, I get an email and it doesn't wake me up. If it's critical, they will say, "Hey, you have a critical issue with this," and so I get a phone call, which does help. Because you get so many emails, you don't want it waking you up all through the night. This is its advantage, then I can look at the email and figure out what we need to do to get the issue resolved.
For example, there was an extreme overtemperature, where the switch failed, and it locked the heater in on the MCC room in the middle of the summer. Even though it was at night, the heater was running, so they called me. They woke me up on that one, and they're like, "Buddy, it's like 120 degrees in your MCC room." That's getting critical. So, we were able to get folks directed that way who shut off the heater instantly, and then we fixed the thing when the normal crew came first thing in the morning.
For other issues, we are typically already hearing from the operators. So, the 24/7 monitoring is good, but I don't know if it's absolutely critical for my application.
We have a next day service with them. If I call them today, they're here tomorrow.
The capacitors and batteries are not covered under warranty, so on the older units, they tell me, "Hey, your capacitors are near the end of their life. The UPS looks good but your capacitors are near the end of their life. You need to replace those before much longer." This is not covered under the warranty because the capacitors and batteries are a wear item, like the tires on your car. They tell me, "Hey, these need to be replaced," and that's part of the annual PM, where they come in and check stuff. They'll open it up and look at it.
One was very obvious. The guy pointed out, "Hey, look at your capacitors; they're swelling." The top is supposed to be flat, but it was rounded off. It was easy to see those things are rounded off. They were bad and swelling. Something inside had failed. They were at the end of their life and had failed. So, they were able to do that before we ever had power loss from the UPS. Part of their annual PM is having them come in, and they are proactive and checking things. However, they don't typically replace the parts before they fail.
We will do the PMs annually, which are done during our shutdown. So, we will do shutdowns and tell Eaton, "We will be shutting down this week. These are the best days for your guy to come in." That is regardless of the PredictPulse, which is more for the day-to-day maintenance. The annual PM revolves around our shutdowns because they don't want anybody messing with the UPS when everything is running. They would rather do it when everything is shutdown.
We have a PredictPulse alarm. The technician seemed to know what it was, and when I talked to the technician, and the guy was going, "Man, I am swamped. That is not going to shut you down. Reset it if you can, and could I come the next day?" I was like, "I'm fine with it." So, he didn't come the next day per contract, but I also didn't want the man in here after he had just worked 24 to 28 hours straight either. So, the issue was something that wasn't going to shut my plant down, but it better prepared him. Because he could look at it, and go, "Oh, that's not an issue that's going to blow your UPS up, and I can fix it then."
Other times, you can look at it, and go, "Hey, this is what we have," and he's going, "Oh, I don't have that board in my truck. It's going to take me 30 minutes longer to get there, but I will run by my house and get my spare parts out of the garage because that fault is 99.99 percent of the time this power board. So, I'm going to put that in my truck before I come up there." We're like two hours from his house, so the last thing I need him do is drive up here, and then go, "Oh crap, I need that board," and then turn around and have to go back. By having the PredictPulse, and it saying, "Here's what your fault is." Then, he can say, "This is what it is the vast majority of the time," and get the board before he comes up here.
It helps him prepare, rather than just going, "Okay, I've got a UPS fault." That doesn't help a whole lot. By having the PredictPulse with the errors popping up, he can say, "Yeah, that's probably this one. It will take me a little bit longer to get there, but I'm going to go by and do this on the way."
I don't know what they did before PredictPulse here.
It was a absolute major pain to set up in the organization, but that was not PredictPulse, that was our IT department.
If you take a new system and go online with it, it is absolutely horrible because PredictPulse has to send an email out, and it is incredibly difficult to get our IT security to allow the solution to send an email out. We hook it up with Eaton, then it's ready to go. I can immediately ping and pull it up with the web browser and look at the system, but then IT blocks it for the next three months while we try to convince them to let it out.
The Eaton technician has the setup done before he leaves at the end of the day. It is not that big of a deal. They came in and did it for us so we did not have to do it. Even without them, I think we could have done it fairly easily.
To just add the cards to a system that did not previously have the card, the UPS tech comes in and he calls his 1-800 number for his engineering support. They talk about it a bit, and in a couple of hours or so, they have it working.
The only time I talked to their tech support was when we first were putting one in and couldn't get it to email out. That turned out it was our IT department. They gave me the information I needed to go to our IT department. I called Eaton and they directed me to their PredictPulse expert there. That's the only time we've ever had to use the PredictPulse tech support.
It has probably saved us six figures several times. That's my opinion, because it allows us to fix issues before they bite us. If there wasn't a return on investment, I would be telling them, "Hey, let's get rid of this junk. It ain't worth it." But, I think it is worth it. Having a technician look at it once a year and advise the capacitors that were bad by saying, "Here they are. They're bad." Anybody can tell they're bad when he points it out. Look at them swelling. That prevented the plant from going down. That was only one unit, but it would have been six figures if it flipped even for a fraction of a second.
PredictPulse tells me stuff like, "Hey, this room's too hot," that's going to kill my UPS. That's going to shut this thing down. It might prevent a power outage. Right there, that one's not quite as critical, but you're talking, if they go down, tens of thousands at a minimum of loss. So, it pays for itself by having the ability to know without having to walk out there all the time and look at it, because people will get busy, then they won't do their rounds and stuff getting missed. With PredictPulse, it doesn't get missed.
Someone doesn't have to waste time gliding around the plant checking the UPSs that are warped. PredictPulse notifies you which makes it so you don't have to worry about it. Nobody has to waste any time going and looking at these things. We get emails saying, "Hey, I'm not happy," for whatever reason. I really don't know how often we would need to check them if we did not have PredictPulse. They probably would want somebody walking by and looking at them weekly, so I would say that we are saving several hours for someone a week.
It's part of our service contracts, so it's not broken down as a separate line item.
The PredictPulse is wrapped in with the PMs that are done, so it's not like, "Oh, PredictPulse has half the PM cost. We need to get rid of that." I don't know what it costs. It's just all-in-one: Here is the price to do an annual PM, including PredictPulse, having the technician respond within one day of a call.
It provides us the information and data that we need. I would recommend it.
I had the PredictPulse mobile app on my other phone, but then they gave me a new phone and I need to get that loaded. I didn't have any issues with it at all when I used it. I was able to breeze through it with no problems. This was something they just started in the last few months. They sent me an email to put PredictPulse on my phone, and I loaded it, but then they sent me another phone and I have not loaded it. I explored it a little, but not a lot. Instead, I get the emails which tell me what's going on. That's what I rely more on than looking at the app.
I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. I don't if it is perfect, but it is pretty close.
The use case for PredictPulse is because of the critical function of the UPS's and the scarcity of manpower. Although we have a SCADA system, we wanted a monitoring system for the UPS's that will give us much information about their status, which would aid in quick maintenance, given the reduced manpower available.
We plan to install 25 Eaton 93PM UPS's. These UPS's are primarily used for emergency lighting and data notification in an emergency. They also operate our communication radios during an emergency.
This is our second generation of Eaton UPS's. Since the system opened we have had Eaton units and we're now replacing those obsolete units with the newer model UPS's. That means we are confident in the performance of the Eaton product because of our experience with it for the past 15 to 20 years.
Our units are deployed in passenger stations in the underground commuter rail system for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
PredictPulse reduces the manpower needed to do maintenance because the technical data presented in the reports save precious time. We can do less maintenance, from every three months to every six months. So we're saving on critical manpower resources by the monitoring of the unit.
It will save me money on manpower needed for maintenance, as we will be able to maintain these units with a smaller staff because of the PredictPulse data reporting feature. These things were just put online three months ago so an evaluation of the hours saved is still premature. The rail system covers an eight to 10 mile area and for maintenance we have to travel each site to look at each unit, work on it, and then travel back. All that time would be charged to maintenance. We will be saving significant amount of hours, cumulatively over time, because we won't have to travel to the sites. The PredictPulse software will be reporting the status of the units back to us, remotely.
We're a 24/7 operation and my staff does maintenance 24/7. Anytime a unit is taken offline for maintenance, I'm notified, anytime of the day and any day of the week. PredictPulse notifies me remotely what's happening. That gives me proof and demonstrates that I can have confidence in knowing that this critical piece of equipment is always available for its purpose and critical use.
The most valuable feature is the instant notification, remotely via email, of any change in the status of the UPS, which is important. The UPS's provide critical control functions, such as emergency lighting and operation of emergency communications for passengers, and operation of critical radio systems which are needed for communication between Metro and the local Sheriff department.
I receive notification from the call center when a unit's critical function has been lost. When a unit was on battery, I was notified multiple times by the call center. Of course, it was planned maintenance; we do testing and as part of that we do have to take them offline and test them for 90 minutes. We have a city ordinance which requires all emergency systems to be tested annually for 90 minutes. When we perform this test, I get a notification from Eaton's call center that the unit is offline. That makes me confident that the performance of the PredictPulse software is as desired.
Currently, we're in the one-year warranty period offered, so Eaton is hosting PredictPulse on their cloud. But one of the great functions of it is that we still get a local email notification of the statuses of the UPS's, in addition to the dashboard in the cloud which provides a lot more clarity about the information collected and monitored. That information includes things like battery voltages, battery life, installation history, and current voltage in power flow to the load. Those detailed data are really critical to see the status of UPS and make sure it's functioning and healthy in all phases and that all the data and levels are within the proper parameters. The dashboard they provide is a very informative tool for monitoring the health of the UPS.
You can also program a report at the frequency you choose — I chose a monthly frequency — and get a report from each unit describing the average performance throughout that time period. That's very critical because we can use that as a maintenance tool to monitor the health of the unit.
I have been using Eaton PredictPulse for about three months.
The stability of PredictPulse is really good. I have had no problem with stability.
It scales. We have plans to add several units to the account. Each one has to be individually activated. We intend to get all 25 units on it.
The scalability is there even more so because we have other units from other projects. I plan to recommend putting the communication card in them for PredictPulse, in the future, so we stay on the same platform.
Their technical support is very good. Contacting them is good and they respond in a reasonable amount of time. And the solutions are implemented in a reasonable amount of time.
The system we had before was a local monitoring system but we never really had a monitoring system for the UPS's before now.
The primary reason we went with PredictPulse was to have optimum maintenance of the system with minimal manpower because. Manpower resources are scarce in the agency. It's difficult to hire a large number of people and it's also difficult to get skilled people because you have to be trained in the skills for maintaining UPS's. You have to train the staff for each model. There is a cost saving there because now I don't have to train people because the PredictPulse software, along with the service that Eaton offers, will save me maintenance and training.
The setup is really easy. Eaton's technical department was really helpful in teaching us how to set things up and to register each unit.
The setup of PredictPulse took about a week because we had internal problems with our network. As a government agency we're required by law to isolate and set up firewalls and have a lot of security. All of our networks are highly secured from the outside. Each new network has to be separated from the others. That makes it very difficult because there is so much security in the design of the system, because the government doesn't want cross-contamination, or if one system goes down that it doesn't bring down the enterprise system. PredictPulse needs internet access to talk to the computer and all that has to be isolated in its own network and firewall. I have a big challenge, internally, setting it up and it's in process at this time. It's very difficult to get permission to get outside access to the world. It's not PredictPulse's problem, it's just the way we're required by government to operate.
I have UPS service contracts with Liebert and Vertive and Eaton's prices are comparable.
The cost is reasonable compared to the risk if our systems were to go down because we are a public agency and we want to reduce the risk to our clients who need that service if there's an emergency.
For the first year, there is no cost to PredictPulse, with the warranty. In future years, we'll have to enter into a contract for professional service and parts supply.
We did not evaluate other options because the product requires Eaton software. I don't know of a third-party that would be compatible with the Eaton communication part.
The lesson I've learned is that it's a dependable solution to the maintenance and operational requirements for the UPS's that we have.
In our company I use PredictPulse as the manager and my team of inspectors maintain the system. Ultimately, there will be about 10 people who will have access to it, when it's finished.
I plan to use the PredictPulse mobile app, but at this time, since we are just in the beginning stages and we have only installed three units so far out of the 25, I haven't started using it. I will use it as soon as we have finished setting up.
In terms of proactive parts replacement, at this time we are still in the first phase of the use of this product and we are under warranty. After the warranty phase is up, we'll go into agreement regarding parts replacement, because we don't stock any parts on hand at the company. We have parts agreements in other contracts with Liebert and other companies, because we have other models. We will be making an agreement for parts and service because we don't have trained staff on hand for the UPS's.
I would rate PredictPulse at nine out of 10. I'm still new to it but I was able to go in there and do some configuration and I liked that feature, that functionality, that it allows you to do some of the configurations yourself. Everything is automatic.
I haven't studied the whole UPS market and all that's available. I'm a very busy person. I'm running a department of 100-plus people and a lot of capital projects. My background is a degree in electrical engineering and I've been at my company for 30 years. For 28 of the 30 years, I've been writing specifications for batteries and UPS's. I analyze them. I do calculations on battery capacities. So I understand UPS's and their function. Because I didn't do a full market study I wouldn't give it a 10.
I know there are many other UPS companies but all my Eaton products have performed well for the duration of their lives. I don't have problems with Eaton products, except that they're proprietary. I've had people trained on Eaton products and there is a learning curve for getting to know these devices.
We have three 93PM UPS systems from Eaton. We use it as backup power for the control systems that we have at our facility. We're pretty happy with them. We're pretty happy with the PredictPulse system as well that was installed about a month ago because since then, we have had two events where PredictPulse has notified us and cut our troubleshooting time down tremendously in each of these instances.
We have had these units for almost three years now. We have been very satisfied with the operation of these UPS systems. We have had two units in the past month since we've had this PredictPulse system installed that had issues where they needed to be repaired, but Eaton was able to come out and repair them in a very timely fashion. And we've been very happy with the operation of this equipment.
PredictPulse is a system that is hooked up to each of our UPS systems that notify us as the end-users of any faults, problems, or issues that might arise in the UPS systems during its lifecycle and during normal operations.
PredictPulse saved us time by helping to avoid downtime and other problems. It would take 20 minutes to an hour to try to figure out the problem, whereas we immediately knew where the problem was with the help of PredictPulse. It easily saves us hundreds of man-hours just for that downtime. For production, we did have production lost and that could be in the thousands to possibly millions of dollars.
The most valuable feature is that I can get on my computer and I can click on each of the three units that we have here in the facility. I can pull up all the information that I need to perform an inspection as far as gathering data, input voltage, output voltage, output current, and total input KVA frequency, and stuff like that.
We are very satisfied with PredictPulse's reporting in terms of the visibility and insight it gives us into our UPS equipment and how it operates. When something happens, we not only get an email to notify us but also a phone call. At the same time simultaneously, the Eaton technician gets the same notification and he is able to dispatch with the correct parts to come and repair the system.
I find the PredictPulse mobile app to be very easy to navigate. I have no problem with it and I enjoy using it.
The information it provides is very in-depth, helps me during weekly inspections, and also notifies me of any trouble or any predictions. We haven't had the system long enough to really be able to generate predictions to let us know battery life and stuff like that. In the future, I'm sure these predictions will come out and we'll be able to assess future issues that might arise.
Eaton's 24/7 remote monitoring has definitely helped to alleviate stress for us. It cuts down our troubleshooting time if there's an issue. We know exactly where to go when we're having a power issue because we've been notified, which is nice.
We had an issue over the weekend. My colleague knew exactly where the issue was so he immediately went to the problem and was able to go from there. But if he did not have that notification or knew that the problem was at the UPS system, then it could've taken him anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to figure out where the problem was.
If something happens where we need technicians to come as soon as possible to make a repair, they are here in a very timely manner. They leave pretty much wherever they're at and they come to help. We've been very satisfied with their service.
I would like to see more voltage and current values. Input voltage has a phase to phase option and then there is a phase to neutral option for each phase and there are three phases. So it would be nice to see an average of each of those instead of just a voltage for each individual phase. If there was an average of those three, then that would be less math for me.
I'm sure as I use it more, I'll be able to come up with things that need improvement, but as of now, I'm pretty happy with the way it performs and how easy it is to navigate around the PredictPulse application online and on the cell phone.
I have been using PredictPulse for a month.
It's pretty stable. It's been pretty reliable so far.
No maintenance is required. It's, for the most part, very hands-off.
Their support is top-notch. They do a great job.
The communication between the Eaton technicians and my colleague is good. They're very good with communication and calling us, letting us know when they'll be here, when parts for these repairs are coming, and things like that. They're very personable as well onsite.
We did not previously use a different solution. We just did it the old-fashioned way and went up and visually put eyes on the systems and made sure there were no alarms on the screen. That was about it.
The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very easy.
We had to install a couple of outlets coming from the UPS systems. That was very easy. And then the Eaton technicians came in and it only took them a day to install the routers and ethernet switches for our three units. So it took no time at all. It was very fast.
The pricing was nice. The whole reason we got into it initially was that they had a discount and so we jumped on that discount. But we're very happy we did because it has served us well so far.
There are additional costs. There's a yearly or monthly fee. I remember it not being too expensive. I remember it being worth the price.
The costs are completely worth it. We saved a lot of money figuring out where the issue was first because it significantly decreased our troubleshooting time during plant outage events.
I would highly recommend Eaton PredictPulse to reduce overall troubleshooting time. It's easy to view any information on the UPS system from anywhere. I can be at home and pull it up and view the UPS systems, all the values, and make sure that they're in a good state and not in alarm. That is definitely very nice. It's remote monitoring. They dispatch their technicians with the correct parts quickly. Sometimes I don't even have to call and they'll call me and tell me they're on the way.
I would rate PredictPulse a nine out of ten.
I've only really used it for sending out a report whenever there's an outage. Occasionally I might run a report for the health of it, and that's about it. The real use of it would be for our radiology department, since they were the ones who purchased the UPS itself. We just helped set up the notifications, if there is an outage, and anything that deals with the reports for it.
The Eaton equipment we have is mostly the UPS, which is directly for our CT machine. It's the only thing that's hooked up to that UPS.
I don't have any examples of how it might have changed the function of our radiology department. But if we've ever had an outage or anything happened with our CT, it's made it quicker when contacting our third-party vendor that supports the CTs. That has been faster, but I've had fairly limited experience because it's the first one I've ever really dealt with. But Eaton themselves have been very reliable. I haven't had any issues with them.
PredictPulse's 24/7 remote monitoring has helped to alleviate stress. Whenever we've had downtime for the hospital itself, we've been able to run reports and send them. Because I have email on my phone, I get the reports there and I can send them to the chief of nursing for the hospital or to the CEO. And they can see if at least the CT is doing okay, and that there's no damage to the CT unit. That has been a relief. Management has been happy with having that kind of knowledge.
PredictPulse has saved us money by the CT unit being up and accessible for ER and for med/surge. Even if we've had an outage, they have at least been able to continue to run CTs. The downtime doesn't usually last more than a day or two, at most. If we were to run eight or nine CTs in a day at $800 per CT, those are the kinds of savings we're talking about for a given incident. We've had three or four such incidents in a year.
It has also definitely saved time, helping us know that things are up and running and that there is no issue with the CT itself.
We haven't received any alarm notification calls from Eaton as a result of using PredictPulse. They did reach out to us once, but that was only because I had not properly set up the report portion of PredictPulse and the reports were not going out to everybody. That was just user error on my part. But they did proactively reach out to me to correct that.
The most valuable feature is being able to run reports on it. We get a monthly report on outages and usage and we can see how often we've had downtime, if we've had downtime.
It's been working very well. The only issue I've ever had with it was when we did the initial setup. We had issues getting it to bypass through the firewall. Their support staff were very helpful and we were able to get that taken care of pretty quickly, within a day or two.
We've had Eaton PredictPulse for about a year.
The reliability of the UPS has been pretty good. While we have had ups and downs with power supply in the area, in general—we have had some strong winds that knocked out cable lines—we've never had any issues with the CT scanner being out or being unable to be used. We haven't had any issues with the Eaton equipment. I have no complaints whatsoever.
We only have one Eaton UPS in our entire environment at this time. That might change. We have a nuclear radiology machine, but, at this time, for budget reasons, we only have the one.
Outside of nuclear med, we don't have very many heavy duty machines in our location.
It's being utilized on a once-a-month timeframe to check on the overall health of it. Other than that, it's just the messaging whenever there's an outage going on. It's used systematically, but on occasion.
My experience with their technical support has been very good. They're responsive and knowledgeable.
We did not have a previous analytics solution.
The initial setup was fairly straightforward, once we got the white paper. I provided that to our firewall engineer. As soon as they had that part, it helped immensely in getting the reports sent out. At that point we fixed how the reports were set up because I did not set that up correctly.
It took about four days, but it wasn't four days of trying real hard. It was something on my plate that needed to get done and I worked on it for about two hours a day over those four days. And that included getting people on my side to get it allowed through.
In addition to me, the firewall person and a networking person were involved to make sure that we had the right VLAN set up for it. At this point, it only requires me for maintenance. There's nobody else involved in that. The radiology manager is the only other person who uses it.
We had someone from Eaton involved because I had opened up a ticket for additional support.
We have seen return on investment using PredictPulse, especially if we've been saving about $25,000 a year on downtime. That's a fairly good return on investment. That offsets the cost of PredictPulse pretty well.
It costs a bit, but it's been fairly good. I can't say I have any complaints with the pricing of it.
I've used other vendors' UPS products in other hospital areas, for quite some time. They're older ones that, as far as I know, do not have any reporting capabilities. With those, we've kept manual track of things. It's a little bit easier, obviously, if you can just run reports.
We didn't look at any other options before purchasing this solution. It was purchased directly through the radiology department. They liked the idea of being able to have those reports directly. Since they were the ones forking up the money, we went in that direction.
I'd recommend Eaton if you want reliable reports and good uptime for whatever units you are going to have plugged into it. And I'd also recommend the solution because of the professionalism of their support.
What I've learned from using the solution is the reliability of it, which I've been happy with. I've also learned that I need to check out the hardware on Insight a little bit more to see if there are any issues.
We are a 911 center, so we have building-wide UPS. We have two very large UPSs, and each of our systems are on either UPS A or B. We were very careful to make sure that everything was on the same UPS. Therefore, if one goes down, we only lose half our center. That is why we went with Eaton. It is just built for that type of resilience. Resilience is everything when you are a 911 center. We have two PDUs supporting the UPSs: Model 9395-550 UPS units.
I use a weblink to access PredictPulse, primarily using the email. We have certain emails for critical things set up to come to us, so we don't really have to use the dashboard often. We use the solution as an alerting system.
Right now, we very carefully filter through and select the emails that we're interested in. When we get an email that says, "I'm sorry, this is going on," then we try to figure it out. For example, with circuit breaker overload, we say, "Let's look at our spreadsheet and see what that circuit breaker goes to. Let's go figure out why this is overloading. This is not good."
Another example might be if we get an email that says, "The building is on generator." Then, why is the building on generator?
Should there be a very catastrophic situation, then we get an email that says, "I'm sorry, but I'm running on UPS." This means we need to figure out why the generator didn't kick on and transfer to our emergency generator number three by using a manual transfer switch ASAP.
The solution is hired wired to our network.
We mostly use it for alerting via email. We rarely find a need to log in. However, when we do, a picture is worth a thousand words. The graphics are really nice if I want to give it someone. For example, if somebody said, "How reliable do you find Eaton?" I could print them those beautiful little graphics, and say, "Well, what do you think?"
The alerting and Event Viewer are the most valuable features. We have to maintain certain records for fire insurance ratings and Event Viewer helps with that.
The alarm notification calls have helped us feel more secure.
I like the dashboard and the way it looks. I like the pretty view.
The email is fantastic. If we just relied on using the web browser once a week on Mondays at two o'clock, then there was a generator failure or something significant on Friday, we don't want to find out on Monday. Therefore, we get instantaneous email. That is why so many people get the email, because whoever is on call/onsite gets that email.
It is just so reliable that we use the email and don't really use the app. The PredictPulse application dashboard lets us know about more information than is there. The reason we found out about this initially was I noticed it on our contract, "Wait a minute, we have what?"
My problem is that certain ports are blocked. I haven't figured out what the problem is and gotten the problem fixed. It might be nice to be able to have some configuration options.
Right now, the problem with our emails is we do not have a way to separate emails to Eaton versus us. So, we get a lot of alerts that we might not get, which are almost considered spam. It would be nice if we could segregate them: This group of people gets these emails and this other group of people gets these emails. As of now, it's a shotgun approach where we get so many. It's like, "Oh God, another one," as opposed to being able to filter out exactly what we do want, since we don't want to miss any.
It is part of our annual contract. We started using it in January of 2012. We used it minimally because our UPS board did not have the ability to provide everything that we now have. Over time, they have upgraded the board to upgrade the solution.
We have yet to have a failure since we have had them. We are a public safety, 911 center, so Eaton was selected for two reasons: its reliability and ability to go into power save mode.
The system is so reliable. We certainly count very heavily on our vendors as a 911 center. Also, we do have other 24/7 vendors who watch everything, which is important to us. As the system gets older, we may start relying on them more heavily to double check things, e.g., with some of our other systems, we had have them come in and remotely check everything before a hurricane because we can't take a chance.
We got a new control board with the new version of PredictPulse a little over a year ago. It's just so reliable that we haven't really gone in and played that much with what it does now that it's been updated.
I called their contact on their webpage for assistance: The first number was an invalid number and the second one got me to BMW who asked me for my contract number.
When the technical support updated Eaton, there was an issue with getting our accounts setup. It seems our email addresses have numbers in them, and apparently, that was the issue. So, we had to call tech support and create an account. They got that fixed. Other than that, I haven't had to call them. It took a while to fix, but they were very friendly and helpful. They went out of their way to help us out.
Eaton has a subcontractor from General Power and Control Corp. that does the scheduling. Those kinds of things go through them rather than through Eaton themselves.
PredictPulse Insight might be something that would be feasible. I don't know if you need to have a place to add extra nodes, but if they could consider giving us a YouTube video on some of the features of it or a quick webinar, like Zoom meeting or training on it, to let us know what all we can do with it. Then, it might be feasible. Obviously, this is not something that you want to schedule right now when everybody is doing virtual conferences. We don't want to do anything now, as it's a 480 volt system. So, I'm not touching it.
Compared to our old solution, if we had a power failure and were on generator, we relied on text messages from Entergy or a text message from the people on the floor that said that the lights had been on dim for way too long.
I don't want to know what would happen if we had to go back to the old days where they sent emails that said I'm sorry that the lights went a little too long or the generator kicked in again. We knew that it kicked in for exercise on X day, X time, but you'd be surprised how often we didn't get that email. In fact, we had to set up a UPS workstation hiding in a corner, Then, when the power went off, it sent out an audible alert so they would know to send us an email.
One of the reasons Eaton was selected was the power save mode. In fact, I believe the building contractor had hoped to use what they considered some equivalent UPS system, and it was vetoed because it didn't have a power save feature. This one was spec'd, and we're very happy with it. We've always been extremely happy with the professionalism and training of the technicians.
When it was initially set up, we built a new building. This solution was spec'd to be put in the building when it was built. Before we took significant completion, they trained us, but it was installed before the building was active.
Eaton had to change the cards so we could use all of the features of PredictPulse. Apparently, there were some issues when we were getting it programmed. I believe it failed, then Eaton's person came in, but he got called out for an emergency so we didn't get the new one in and programed. So, for that two week period, we received an alert that said, "We can't see your equipment. What's going on?"
Our entire team is responsible for administrating and maintain this solution. This is our entire tech and facilities team, which includes approximately eight people.
It hasn't really saved us money. Because if the system goes down, we have to go to our backup sites. We need to have power. There is no way a 911 center could run without it though, it carries us over every time our generator kicks in. It gives us the confidence that should the generator fail, we have enough time to get our generator functional or get to our backup site. As a 911 center, we're not exactly a big office building or even a big medical center, so we need to have the suspenders and a belt.
This solution has kept us from having to go to the backup site due to the generator. We have had the generator fail and the automatic transfer switch fail, but the UPS carried us over.
The solution has saved us time and increased productivity by allowing us to focus on other tasks. We don't have to do a thing for this solution, other than schedule our preventative maintenance annually, e.g., we're scheduling the capacitors and batteries right now. We had some scheduling issues last year because it was hurricane season as well as all the problems with changing out the cards, but they did all the work for that.
Event Viewer saves me a lot of time when getting everything ready for our fire insurance rating inspection, once every seven to eight years.
In order to give us the latest, greatest version of PredictPulse, Eaton had to give us new cards on our UPS systems. Eaton provided the cards and had our technician install them at no cost to us.
In our case, the pricing and licensing were put it in our annual contract.
While Eaton is not an educational application, it's very helpful and user-friendly. I learned I can rely on it.
I cannot access it using the web browser, but I'm going to fix that today.
I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).
We use it to provide uninterrupted power to security systems, gaming systems, and surveillance systems on a gaming floor at a casino.
On our casino floor, in a power outage, hundreds of games could go down and would need to be manually brought back up. Even though we can run off generator power, we need that bridge to get us there and it's been doing it since. It has been taking care of it.
We use Eaton's remote monitoring and it's pretty comprehensive if there's any kind of issue. It's measuring and monitoring things. The remote monitoring makes my job easier and makes me more productive. With the remote monitoring, we don't have to physically look at the piece of equipment. I could be offsite. I could be anywhere and I can see how it's operating or any issues it could be having. I can do that from my phone.
Many of its features are valuable, but the ability to be notified in real-time is the most valuable aspect. I can be at home, it could be the middle of the night. We have it set up so that it sends emails to people if it engaged. If the power has gone out or something has gone wrong, we're notified immediately. There are three of us who receive those alerts, in the roles of director of facilities and facility managers.
The only thing I can think of is the remote monitoring. When it's communicating something, if there's an event or there's an issue, the dashboard and how it's presented could be improved. I know what it's communicating, but if we had someone at a different level monitoring it, they might not understand if it's a critical item. The remote monitoring dashboard could be simplified.
I have been using Eaton PredictPulse for about 10 months.
It's stable, absolutely. We haven't had any issues.
It's expandable. Whether we have the space to expand it is another story.
We're not maintaining it internally. If there's any maintenance or repair work to be done, that would be done by Eaton. Other than checking it and making sure it's running, we're not maintaining it internally.
We haven't had to use Eaton's helpdesk or field service so far.
If I recall correctly we had an Emerson unit previously.
We had a room we had to fit the solution in. That's how we came to the system, so it would fit in the room that we had for it. Compared to the old system we had, it has a larger footprint, but the old one did not take care of as much as the new system does. The power density is greater than what we were dealing with before.
If we would have upgraded the old system, the footprint from adding on to that old system wouldn't have fit in the space that we had available.
We had a greater comfort level with the Eaton products. In part that was because of how it fit in the space we were dealing with; we were constrained. In addition, there are no issues with hotspots. Beyond that, we also use a lot of Eaton equipment throughout our property. Keeping in line with that was definitely a positive.
The initial setup was a complex project, but the install was pretty straightforward. It was handled well. An electrician was used as part of the install and there were people from Eaton here. It was a positive experience. They were fine.
The deployment took a few days. Once they had the equipment in there it was a few days until they had it up and running.
We were converting how the power is distributed to all parts of our building. We had to take down the old UPS system and bring up the new one to supply areas of our property, in sections. We would do it overnight to lessen the impact on our guests and team members.
The cost associated with having to bring our gaming equipment up manually anytime there's a power outage, surge, or sag in the area is where we see ROI. I couldn't really put a value on that. It provides us with uninterrupted service for all our other systems.
We priced out the entire project with multiple options and the Eaton equipment was right in line with our budget. I'm not aware of any costs in addition to initial fees.
It saves us time and it saves us money. If the equipment that it protects is valuable to your business, it will keep it operating.
It was the right system to go with. We're close to a year in, and there have been zero issues. In the preceding couple of years we had so many issues with the old system; it was undersized and it wasn't really protecting everything that the current one is. It has given us that reliability. We were able to make the system larger and cover more equipment. It's hard to compare apples to apples because we weren't covering the same things, but it makes all the difference in the world, if you're going to use a product like this, to make sure it's covering all of your important, the critical items.
We're using other Eaton solutions in our environment and they're reliable. We've had power issues here and the Eaton equipment holds up. Eaton covers it all. There are things that they provide that we don't have here on our property, but what they have is pretty comprehensive.
The primary use case is notifications for all the Eaton UPS devices in our organization. This lets us know when the system is down or having other issues, as far as connectivity, input/output, battery level, and reports.
We are using the most recent version.
We now have knowledge of what is going on with power fluctuations. Before, when we were offsite, we wouldn't know if the system was down or if there was a power outage. Now, I get alerts.
I receive my monthly reports from it, so I haven't needed to logon directly in a very long time.
I use the feature which alerts me to power outages, whether it is going on and off the battery. E.g., this feature came in handy last weekend when the Department of Water and Power took the power down. They said that it was for 12 hours, but it ended up being 14 hours. I could manage the readings on the batteries, ensure they weren't draining, and everything was okay. They made it through the whole outage.
We did have an issue getting it initially connected from our system through their particular email address. It was hard because we have a security parameter. It took two or three technicians to figure out that we had to remove the monitoring in our email addresses due to firewalls. We were blocking them and they were blocking us because the message would not always translate after it was encrypted leaving from us. We had to do a bit of work in our security email system to make our UPS system and PredictPulse part talk to their collection agent. I don't know why it happened. At one point, we could see them but they weren't picking up the pulses that were required to send back to us. This took work to resolve and could be streamlined.
I've had absolutely no trouble. I've had no repairs on it with zero problems.
It does not require any require any maintenance from me. If there was any issue, I would contact Eaton.
We only have one UPS.
We have not thought about increasing our usage of Eaton products at this time since we are not sure if we are going to stay in our building.
Eaton's field technician came out for service. The service was great. He was very experienced. We had only had the solution for a little while, so I had a lot of questions. He answered every last one of them without a problem. The last time that he came out was two years ago.
One time, we had an unscheduled outage. Eaton support called and let me know that we were having an issue, which was pretty cool.
The service is prompt.
I haven't needed to contact Eaton's technical support because of PredictPulse.
We previously had a generator, which was insufficient.
We had a small fire in our ceiling. Then, we had to get big giant fans to keep the room cool to keep the equipment going. It was pretty messy. So, we spent a lot of money in a very short time frame.
Now, when the UPS kicks on, the generator knows. If the UPS is running longer than five minutes, the generator kicks in.
The initial setup was straightforward.
An engineer from Eaton came in and set PredictPulse up. He explained everything to us, including the requirements.
It was simple for me. He just needed to know who our electricians were. He worked with our electricians to get it set up. We didn't have any issues because we had to have the room wired for it and all the information was direct.
The service has earned its place in our life, a millions of times over. It was a lot of work to keep things going without it. E.g., we had our 14-hour outage and were just fine.
It is saving our organization around $10,000 a month.
We have bought all of the features of PredictPulse because each of them serves a different purpose for us.
We pay $4,000 for the Eaton 93PM UPS, which includes PredictPulse. It is a reasonable price.
We did evaluate other competitors, but we didn't have a lot of time. Eaton was the best because of its uptime and support.
We decided to add on PredictPulse for the notifications. However, we did not look into competitors for the services.
Do it. PredictPulse sends out emails no matter where you are. You can keep track of the electric current going on in your system. It keeps you in the loop and knowledgeable. It will let you know when an issue has cleared. It is very much worth the expense.
We're using Eaton's UPS systems with PredictPulse. All our UPSs are tied in. They report to PredictPulse with daily emails or notifications. We use PredictPulse to monitor the UPS systems and conditions.
It gives us the opportunity to know if we have an issue with a UPS and then it invokes the automated service ticketing system. So we don't really have to do anything. Eaton gets the alarm, they schedule the site visit, and they come and fix the problem.
I'm not aware of any feature other than the notifications. It provides notifications about our UPSs so that it can generate service calls automatically with Eaton. They get a monthly report.
Their field technicians are very good. For example, they're coming to replace a battery tonight. The issues that we have had with the systems have been pretty minor. We've had one bad module that they had to replace. There haven't been many issues with the product, but when there have been issues, they've been able to get onsite in a timely fashion and get them repaired. We've never had to have them come back. They've always been able to come out and make the repair without having to make a return visit.
I don't know if the way they do the emails, daily, is the best way. It seems like they could come up with a better solution for communication. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it just seems like it's a little outdated.
They could look at SMS messaging or multimedia messaging. I'm sure there are some other messaging-type systems available for generating less traffic than an email. Maybe they could provide a more secure messaging system. I would suggest that they look at other technology available.
There are a lot of things have to be working for it to work; not just PredictPulse but everything on the customer's end has to be functioning too. But we haven't seen any issues with PredictPulse, itself, not getting the data. The only issue that I know of has been with the email server or internet connectivity; things you would tend to expect with this type of set up.
We don't have any plans to scale this any further. It's only being used for notification and generation of automated service calls.
Eaton's technical support has been great. They're top-notch.
We did not have a previous solution. We implemented PredictPulse to provide more visibility into the systems. We have our own automation system that monitors, but that still requires us to generate a service call. Eaton PredictPulse eliminates that and automates that aspect for us.
The initial setup was straightforward. We set up an email server and PredictPulse sends emails out every few minutes with the status of UPS. The biggest thing is that you have to have an email server that can handle the number of daily emails that it's generating. We have several UPS units so there are a lot of emails, but the setup wasn't a problem. It's not complex. You just need to understand that the system will generate a lot of emails on a daily basis.
If you're not a technical guy, you're not going to understand that. You have to be an IT person to understand how to set up PredictPulse. So different customers might give a different answer than I have.
For us, the setup of PredictPulse took a few minutes. It was pretty simple. You just set up the firmware and the UPS system has an email address and then you just turn it on.
We had Eaton come in. We gave them the IP configurations that they needed, the Ethernet configurations, SMTP configurations, etc. We gave them the information and then they programmed it and set it up. Our experience with their deployment team was fine. There were no problems.
We probably haven't seen return on our investment by going with PredictPulse because we haven't had the type of failure that would give us that. PredictPulse is risk-mitigation. So until you have a need to mitigate a risk, it's hard to get an ROI. You almost need a catastrophic failure to understand the value of the service.
My advice is don't buy it just because it's there but because you have a need for it. You have to understand your own needs and then see if PredictPulse will be that solution to your needs.
The solution is doing what it needs to do. It's has provided us a service that we felt we needed.
The visibility the service provides into our UPS equipment through the reporting is okay. There isn't much to report other than the UPS conditions. We also have dynamic monitoring of our UPS systems, so the PredictPulse report confirms what we already know. The PredictPulse reports are fine. We don't have a problem with them. That's not really the reason we got PredictPulse, but there's no problem with them.
We use an Eaton Service Plan. The only remote monitoring we have is with PredictPulse. The repairs that we have had done through our agreement have met all of the criteria of our agreement, as far as responding and service go.
The only people we have using PredictPulse are data center engineers or critical facility technicians. It's a team of about six to seven people. We don't need any people for deployment and maintenance of PredictPulse because it's a managed service by Eaton.
We are using Eaton SecureConnect Installer Cloud, which is a private cloud deployment model.
The service has definitely quickly deployed field technicians. At one of our sites, the temperature in the room was rising. Because we received a notification, we were able to get an engineer dispatched to the site to the HVAC problem. Had we not done that, we might have ended up with a UPS failure.
We have found the most valuable features to be the ones which notify us that the UPS is on battery, then notifying us that the temperature in the room is too hot.
I like visibility the service provides into our UPS equipment through its reporting, but it could be better. I would like it to be easier to set up for the specific things I'd like to monitor and how we would like to get notified. E.g., I would like to have battery run-time be more of an alert because I don't really care when the unit goes on battery, as long as it goes on battery. However, something I would care about is if the battery was down below 10 percent. That would be something which would be good to get notified on. It would also be good to have past data to be able to drill into if something had happened a week ago to do failure analysis on.
The stability seems great. We have not had any problems there.
When you look at it from the perspective of a national company like ours, it would be nice to be able to start at a high level, like by region, then drill down by service area, site, and then by building. That way there is some type of hierarchy set up. Because if you're monitoring all the UPSs, and there are 2000 UPSs in a company, that view could probably be a little better.
We have it at three sites. If we do decide to go with this product, then our goal is to get the network cards installed and get the UPSs on the network, then work with Eaton to get them connected.
There are three of us actively working on the solution. We're a part of a national facilities operations team. We're just focused on doing process improvement with UPSs right now.
I would recommend working with the same people that I have been working with.
It is the first pilot at Kaiser to have a monitoring system.
The initial setup is mostly straightforward once they get you set up. It's a little complex to get additional people setup. I have to go through Eaton to get it setup. Letting me manage users and access would be helpful.
The deployment was super fast. The long part was us getting our network card installed and getting it on the network.
We used Eaton's consultants for the deployment. They were wonderful and very responsive. They not only answer my questions, but improve on them. They are great and very honest. If the product doesn't do something today, they tell me. If it's coming out in the next release, they say it's coming out in the next release. Or, if it's not even in the pipeline, they let me know and say that they will take the feedback.
They have come to visit in person or we have spoken on the phone. Anything that we've needed, they have been helpful. They also helped push me information because this is one one-hundredth of the things that I'm working on. It's very nice to have them keep on top of me and keep things going. So, they have been terrific.
We use service vendors for deployment and maintenance. We have two separate service vendors who can assist if something was needed. They can go out to the site, if needed. We would dispatch them.
Right now, we are not paying anything for it, so the return on investment is great.
If you have a UPS failure, that will be very costly for many reasons. There has definitely been a return there. In the one example where the room got hot, we have no idea how much that would've cost if there had been a failure, but it would have been something that would have cost something. That alone has been a return on the investment.
We are not using Eaton's UPS service plans.
Eaton was only one who offered to let us try it out for free.
We are looking at other options still. We are still looking at Schneider's UPS monitoring solution. We have looked at quite a few others, but none of the others would meet our requirements. So far, we are only looking at these two.
PredictPulse has helped me better define our requirements.
One of the pros of PredictPulse is the majority of our UPSs and the support has been phenomenal. They seem very open to work with us on improvements for future releases and to learn more about what we need as well, so that has been nice.
One of the cons of the PredictPulse is that right now we can only use it on UPSs. From what I understand, that will change in the future. The national viewpoint and data logging are the things that I brought up which could be improved.
I don't think that we use Eaton for repair of these units.