Eaton PredictPulse Reviews

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 I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it just seems like it's a little outdated.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.

• Monitoring UPSs.
• Preventing failures.

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.