Skip to main content

NightWatchman Enterprise 7.3

Power policies

A NightWatchman power policy is a collection of NightWatchman settings that can be applied to a computer to determine how it behaves in terms of its power consumption. Using the NightWatchman power policies, you can apply consistent behaviors for power schemes, shutdowns and wakeups across the network for specific groups of computers. Like power schemes, these power policies are maintained in a library.

Daily scheduled actions

NightWatchman Enterprise supports setting different times, actions and logoffs for each day of the week, letting you tailor NightWatchman behavior to suit your weekly business working practices. Daily scheduled actions are controlled from on the Scheduled Actions tab.

Alarm clocks

An alarm clock definition consists of a weekday and time when it takes place. For example, you may want all the machines in a development department to be available at 08:00am Monday to Friday, except Thursday when there is a team meeting, so the machines should be available at 10:00am.

Alarm clocks wake up the NightWatchman client computer for 60 minutes. If you want the computer to wake up for a different duration, use a maintenance window instead. You can set an alarm clocks from the NightWatchman command-line or from its console.

You can define an alarm clock by creating and applying a power policy. An advantage of using a power policy over the command-line for alarm clocks is that if WakeUp integration is enabled, you can bring a computer out of a power-off state. Using the command-line, you can only bring a computer out of a sleep state. Details on how to configure an alarm clock as part of a power policy can be found here.

Maintenance windows

A maintenance window definition consists of a weekday and time when it takes place, the duration and the action it takes at the end of the event. For example, you may want all the machines in a network to be available for 1 hour at 02:00h every Wednesday to receive Windows updates and shut down afterwards. You can set maintenance windows from the command-line or from its console.

You define maintenance windows by creating and applying a power policy. An advantage of using power policies over the command-line for maintenance windows is that if WakeUp integration is enabled, you can bring a computer out of a power-off state. Using the command-line, you can only bring a computer out of a sleep state. Details on how to configure a maintenance window as part of a power policy in the NightWatchman Console can be found using the The Power Policy dialog.

Computer reclaim

Computer reclaim (formerly hardware utilization) aims to identify the number of computers which are actually being used in an organization – the aim is to identify hardware waste where you have 50,000 computers in your organization but it turns out that no more than 30,000 are actively used at any given time. See the Using Computer Reclaim section for best practices on this.

You can gather computer reclaim data by creating a power policy where the Monitor Computer Reclaim option is enabled and then applying it to the machines you want to monitor. Alternatively, you can enable this feature by setting the 1E Agent HARDWAREUTILIZATION installer property to ON during its installation on the machine you want to monitor.

The sample and aggregation intervals for is set in the NightWatchman Console (more details under the Computer Reclaim section in NightWatchman Settings). Reports are available in the Reports console.

Sleepless client detection

Sleepless client detection helps optimize your NightWatchman client computers ability to go into a sleep state, and as a result increasing power savings and energy efficiency in your organization. There are two levels of sleepless detection – the basic level is enabled by default.

The advanced level requires explicit enabling. It is possible that some applied operating system updates may prevent the advanced sleepless detection feature from functioning correctly. For this reason it is not enabled by default. To benefit from the additional process name information provided by advanced sleepless detection you must enable it. This is done from the Sleepless Client Detection tab in the NightWatchman console.

In basic mode, it reports on faulty input devices and flags potential causes why an unattended computer is failing to enter into a sleep state.

In advanced mode, where possible, it additionally identifies specific processes that prevent the unattended computer from entering into a sleep state. These processes can be added to the sleepless exclusion list to enable the computer to enter into a sleep state where appropriate, regardless of whether the named processes are running at that time.

The process for the basic sleepless detection is :

  1. NightWatchman monitors the keyboard and mouse and if it does not find a period of inactivity that is greater than 30 seconds over a 24 hour period it will report back to Agility Framework Reporting with the input device as potentially being unreliable.

  2. If the input devices are verified as allowing the computer to enter a sleep state, NightWatchman then examines the running processes:

    1. If a process causes overall CPU usage to exceed 20%, it will prevent the computer from going to sleep when it should have and is reported as a busy process.

    2. If a process sets a system required flag, it is noted in the basic sleepless detection mode but the information about the process requesting it will not be available. The <unknown process> is reported as a sleepless process.

  3. The busy and sleepless process information is batched together with other NightWatchman client data and recorded in the Agility Framework Reporting at the next transmission time.

Advanced sleepless detection adds the following information to the basic sleepless detection:

  1. If a process sets a system required flag, the system is analyzed and the actual process name derived and reported as a sleepless process in place of the <unknown process> reported by the basic sleepless detection.

  2. The sleepless detection information from the client is sent back to Agility Framework Reporting and appears in two NightWatchman reports under the heading Sleepless Client Detection:

    1. Busy and Sleepless Processes – indicates the processes running on the client computer that are the likely cause for it not entering into a sleep state.

    2. Untrusted input device – indicates potentially faulty input devices that are the likely cause for a client computer not entering into a sleep state.

Once you have reviewed the NightWatchman reports that identify potential reasons why a particular client computer is being kept from entering into a sleep state, you can add any processes named in the report to the sleepless exclusion list for that particular NightWatchman client. This is where the extra process name resolution of the advanced sleepless detection really comes into its own. We recommend that the Power Policy with the excluded processes only gets applied to the computers reported against in the NightWatchman Busy and Sleepless Processes report.

When a NightWatchman client computer is at the point where it should enter a sleep state, NightWatchman checks any named processes on the sleepless exclusion list. If the only processes preventing sleep are in the sleepless exclusion list NightWatchman will force the computer to enter into a sleep state regardless.

Managing power policies in the NightWatchman console

NightWatchman power policies define configuration settings for both NightWatchman and WakeUp. Together, they control the availability of computers and maximize power savings while minimizing any impact on productivity. Power policies are not assigned directly to computers but they are assigned to the groups that contain the computers. This is done from the Location or Organization group hierarchies.

Creating a new power policy

To add a new power policy:

  1. In the Power Policies section, click the Add button.

  2. Set the required values in the Add Power Policy dialog.

  3. Click OK to save the new power policy.

(question) Click here for a tutorial.

Editing power policies

To edit existing power policies:

  1. In the Power Policies section, select the power policy you want to edit.

  2. Click the Edit button.

  3. Change the required values in the Edit Power Policy dialog, which has the same parameters as the Add Power Policy dialog.

  4. Click OK to save the changes to the power policy.

(question) Click here for a tutorial.

Copying power policies

To copy existing power policies:

  1. In the Power Policies section, select the power policy you want to copy.

  2. Click the Copy button. This takes a copy of the settings of the selected Power Policy and opens the Edit Power Policy dialog.

  3. Change any required values in the Edit Power Policy dialog, which has the same parameters as the Add Power Policy dialog.

  4. Click OK to save the copied power policy.

(question) Click here for a tutorial.

Deleting NightWatchman power policies

To delete an existing power policies:

  1. In the Power Policies section, select the power policy you want to delete.

  2. Click the Delete button.

  3. If the warning option is turned on the Confirm delete dialog will be displayed. Click Yes to continue with the deletion or No to cancel.

  4. Clicking Yes attempts to continue with the deletion. If the power policy has previously been associated with a group in either the Organization or Location hierarchies, a warning dialog is displayed indicating that the power policy is in use and that you are able to delete it.

  5. If the power policy is not currently associated with a group, clicking Yes permanently removes the selected security role from the NightWatchman Console.

(question) Click here for a tutorial.

Disabling the deletion warning dialog

To prevent NightWatchman from displaying the deletion warning dialog every time you delete a power scheme, power policy, tariff, security role or security account, check the Don't ask me again checkbox, located on the warning dialog itself.

Note

Before checking this box, make sure that you definitely do not want the deletion warning dialog to appear as deleting a NightWatchman Console Power Scheme cannot be undone.