Towards Server-Level Power Monitoring in Data Centers Using Single-Point Voltage Measurement

Pranjol Gupta, Zahidur Talukder, Mohammad A. Islam, Phuc Nguyen

Abstract: Server-level power monitoring in data centers can significantly contribute to its efficient management. Nevertheless, due to the cost of a dedicated power meter for each server, most data center power management only focuses on UPS or cluster-level power monitoring. In this paper, we propose a low-cost novel power monitoring approach that uses only one sensor to extract power consumption information of all servers. We utilize the conducted electromagnetic interference of server power supplies to measure its power consumption from non-intrusive single-point voltage measurement. Using a pair of commercial grade Dell PowerEdge servers, we demonstrate that our approach can estimate each server's power consumption with ~3% mean absolute percentage error.