UPS monitoring system

Objective: There were electricity related to issues faced at one hospital. Even after having UPS, they had conditions when the UPS drained off and the computers on the network faced abrupt shutdown. This lead to huge data loss. Hence they wanted a system that can monitor the UPS and when the UPS runs into low battery situation, the system will shutdown all the computers on the network gracefully.

Challenges: The system was pretty much straight forward. Only had to ensure that the application runs all the time in background and in the event of shutdown, proper warnings to the user are displayed in a non-disturbing manner.

Solution: Created two applications. One server which was installed on the computer which was connected to the UPS through the communication link. This server application communicated with the UPS periodically to get the status. Another application was client application that would run on every other computer with an icon in the system tray. Status of the UPS was conveyed to the user using message balloons.