Hi and welcome to our brief overview of the Energy Monitoring
and Power Management component within the latest version of NetSupport DNA. As
you can see on the screen, we've selected the energy monitoring component and
we've selected a date criteria of "this week". On the main view, we can see total
energy used inside of work hours as well as total energy used out of hours. From
our detailed view below, we can expand to see in this example here, the individual
PCs; the time that they've been powered on; how much of that was in and out of
hours; energy used; cost of energy used; and, of course, their CO2 footprint. And this
information here
adjusts, depending on which part of the hierarchy
we select within our main tree view. Now, as well as producing reports on energy
use across the school or your organisation, perhaps more importantly
within our power management feature is we provide the ability to select
departments and configure - not only energy costs, but also our power
management rules.
Let's drill down from our example here and pick a department: the curriculum
department. If I select again from my energy monitoring menu, and I pick "Settings",
you'll see for the curriculum department
I have power management enabled. As a starting point, I've enabled power
management. I've then
enabled power on - and the green line reflects when computers will be
powered on.
In this example here, the machines are set to power on at 07:45 - and the first thing
I should do is turn off Saturdays and Sundays because, clearly, those machines
we don't want to turn at a weekend. In this fictitious example, let's pretend
that I've got a thousand computers in my curriculum department.
I might choose to stagger powering those machines on, if I'm in an old school
building where there's a risk I might trip
the power by having too many machines starting all at once.
Similarly, I can choose when to power off those curriculum machines at the same
time. And, if the machine is logged on,
I can choose what I want to do: suspend it; do nothing; and shut down - the same
when it's logged off.
So this gives me additional controls based on the condition of the machine.
One of the bits of feedback we got from schools was: "This is really, really useful -
but I have to remember to disable it when there's a bank holiday or school
holidays."
So, in the latest version, we've added the ability to prevent the power management
working during holidays. And by selecting the holidays dialog,
you see we can define our holiday periods at the bottom.
Let's hit "set" and you'll see in this example we have defined the summer
holiday, the summer half-term, and the May bank holiday. And again, we can build
up a list appropriate for our school or organisation of any holiday periods
where we don't want our automated power management to apply.
Let's say ok and close that.
No need to save anything and we will return to our settings for the curriculum
department. Now, power management is step one:
turning machines on at a pre-defined point in the day and turning them off. The
second level is what we do with machines that are inactive for a period of time.
And again, within NetSupport DNA, we provide inactivity monitors.
We provide up to two policies, and for each policy - which are defined based on the
colour on the screen.
So here Policy One is our yellow slider and it is set to run from 5:15 in the
evening
through to midnight. The policy says: if any PC is inactive for more than 30 minutes, and
if the machine is logged off, then
shut it down. Of course, we could say do nothing, or suspend it. Or, if it's logged
on, we'll ask the machine to be suspended. Again, we could log it off, shut it down
or do nothing.
Similarly, we can have a second policy that runs during the day. And if we
enable Policy Two and say we'll have that policy running, we could perhaps drag
that policy (as I'm doing here) and say it runs throughout day to this point here.
We can set a different level of threshold during typical teaching times.
Finally, we have the option to warn our users that they are about to be logged off of
or if their
machine is going to be shut down or suspended, and give them the option to
postpone that
process - which, of course, by default we would want to give them. Again,
the main philosophy behind NetSupport DNA is making things very simple and
easy to use, and to ensure that the UI and the way that the configuration is
applied is as logical and intuitive as possible. And that's pretty much it!
A few clicks, two or three minutes' effort and you can have power management
enabled across your campus.