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Sorry if this is too near 'shopping' but after much Googling I've not really found any decent solutions.

What I'd like to do is monitor the power usage, particularly AMPs and kWh/day used by a plug socket in Nagios (Though this could probably apply to any monitoring solution). Are there any solutions/products around that make this data available in an easy-to-get way? SNMP would be ideal but I'm not opposed to a little hacking around if it's got web interfaces/telnet/SSH/something else.

I'd like to be able to monitor each socket individually rather than the usage for the whole strip.

I was considering "hacking" one together myself using Aurdino and some cheap power monitors from Maplins but I didn't know if there was something already available. I have seen a few devices that provide this sort of functionality but they all seem to be integrated with server cabinets or have a load of additional features making them very expensive. Seeing as I could probably piece one together myself for around £100 I'd like to find something up to a max of maybe £150.

We will be using this in our DC which charges us if we go over our power allowance, but I'd be interested to know if anyone has any practical other practical uses for this not involving servers? I was thinking of putting one under my desk if I can get it to work, and make it simple enough to set up, just to see how much power everything was using and when it was using it.

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

Google for a "metered pdu" - many of them can show each outlet individually.

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+1. I would have to agree with this answer over some sort of home brewed solution. We have several (3-phase) APC PDUs, and they display the amperage on an LCD on the unit, and also in the web management software, and it is query-able via SNMP. I use the SNMP OIDs to generate graphs of amp usage on each leg. Note that these devices will definitely be over your 150E budget, but it's quality kit, and has some neat features. Factor in the time to duplicate them with a home built setup, and the price on the APC (or similar) units isn't half bad. –  Kendall Sep 23 '11 at 16:19
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