Integrating with ActiveEfficiency

If you opt to integrate NightwWatchman Enterprise with ActiveEfficiency when you install the NightWatchman Management Center, you gain access to these features:

  • Automated power consumption data catalog updates – ensures your energy costs and savings are up-to-date from the latest updates for power values from our master copy of the power data catalog
  • Hardware inventory – help improve the power data catalog by submitting a summarized version of your company's hardware inventory to your ActiveEfficiency cloud account
  • Cloud-based NightWatchman Cumulative Savings report – provides immediate feedback on the cumulative savings that are made from implementing NightWatchman Enterprise
  • Nomad and WakeUp integration – Nomad uses WakeUp to wake machines that are registered as having specific content

To enable ActiveEfficiency integration, you must configure the following prior to installation:

  1. An active installation on your network of ActiveEfficiency Server 1.9 or later.
  2. MSMQ enabled for both the ActiveEfficiency Server and for the computer where the NightWatchman Management Center is to be installed.
  3. You then specify the location for ActiveEfficiency during the installation of NightWatchman Management Center.

NightWatchman sends power consumption data catalog updates to you to ensure that your energy costs and savings data is up-to-date. You will need to get in touch with 1E support to get this feature enabled in your ActiveEfficiency cloud account.

NightWatchman collects information about your hardware inventory in a summarized version to help 1E improve the completeness of the power consumption data catalog. This improves the accuracy of your savings data as used to generate your savings reports.

Data security is an important aspect of cloud services, especially when sending information and the following points highlight the ways in which your data is protected:

  • All data sent to the cloud is only associated with your unique 1E ActiveEfficiency cloud login, it is not made visible to any other ActiveEfficiency users (apart from our support account administrators)
  • Transmission of data to your ActiveEfficiency cloud account over the public internet is secured using HTTPS.
  • Data is transmitted from NightWatchman Management Center to ActiveEfficiency Server using MSMQ, which enables secure communication between our products.

The items that are retrieved from and sent to the cloud are configured during the installation of NightWatchman Management Center. Prior to enabling these features, you may need to confirm that your organziation's policies allows this data to be uploaded.

Automated power consumption catalog updates

To enable automated power consumption catalog updates:

  1. Install ActiveEfficiency Server on your network and register with the cloud
  2. Install NightWatchman Management Center and enable ActiveEfficiency integration and automated power consumption catalog updates during the installation.
  3. Send a request to 1E support to enable the automated power consumption catalog update feature in the cloud. This process will take around 24 hours to complete.
  4. Start the NightWatchman Management Console and browse to the Power Consumption tab to see the catalog synchronizaion status.

    The Power Consumption tab

Viewing savings in the cloud

When you implement ActiveEfficiency Server in your environment, you have the option to create a 1E ActiveEfficiency cloud account for your company. This gives you access to your own area where you can view savings data for NightWatchman after you have run it for a period of time.

In our example, our chart shows the cumulative savings made based on the assumption that all computers in the company are on 24-hours a day.

Savings to date report

You can modify the currency and the timeframe for these savings by clicking the Edit button.

Modifying the currency and time frame of the savings report

Nomad and WakeUp

NightWatchman Enterprise 7.1 or later provide wake-up capabilities via ActiveEfficiency Server. Nomad 6.2 or later can be configured to wake up Nomad machines to enhance the single-site download feature. For more information, please refer to the Nomad documentation.