{"id":4546,"date":"2026-02-28T11:34:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T11:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/?p=4546"},"modified":"2026-02-28T11:34:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T11:34:20","slug":"node-red-apc-ups-dashboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/?p=4546","title":{"rendered":"Node-Red APC UPS Dashboard"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Living in a rural area we have a very unreliable mains power supply and so I have to protect all the IT equipment in my home lab with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the years I&#8217;ve found APC UPSs to be super reliable and use them extensively around the house to keep important services running during power outages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Running a combination of Debian and Ubuntu operating systems on my servers and virtual machines (VMs) I&#8217;ve always used the <em>apcupsd<\/em> daemon to interface with the UPS for automated shutdowns etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The <em>apcupsd<\/em> daemon does have a very simple web interface that can display 3 items of information at a time but, I decided it would be nice to have a view showing all the information on one dashboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\" noreferrer noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1463\" height=\"659\" src=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow.png\" alt=\"Node-Red APC UPS Flow\" class=\"wp-image-4550\" srcset=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow.png 1463w, https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow-300x135.png 300w, https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow-768x346.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 767px) 89vw, (max-width: 1000px) 54vw, (max-width: 1071px) 543px, 580px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Node-Red APC UPS Flow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Node-Red flow is pretty simple and is based around the <em>apcrequest<\/em> node that connects directly to the <em>apcupsd<\/em> service on port 3551. <br><br><strong>Note<\/strong>: You must configure the apcupsd service as a NIS server in the <br><em>\/etc\/apcupsd\/apcupsd.conf <\/em>config file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of the info is collected via the <em>apcrequest<\/em> node however, I found that getting the events information via the node to be unreliable and so I used a <em>BigSSH<\/em> node to connect to the computer to get the UPS events information directly from the log file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The simple flow collects the data, formats it into a useable format and then passes the data on to the dashboard GUI objects for display, it really is very simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\" noreferrer noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1082\" height=\"1080\" src=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard.png\" alt=\"Node-Red APC UPS Dashboard\" class=\"wp-image-4551\" srcset=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard.png 1082w, https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard-768x767.png 768w, https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Node-Red-APC-UPS-Monitor-Dashboard-100x100.png 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 767px) 89vw, (max-width: 1000px) 54vw, (max-width: 1071px) 543px, 580px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Node-Red APC UPS Dashboard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The resultant dashboard clearly displays all the information needed including line voltage over time. I was surprised to see such a swing in the incoming voltage but, now understand why I get so many low line voltage and over voltage events on the UPS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The events log is displayed in a scrolling text area on the dashboard with colour highlighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you&#8217;d like to create a dashboard for your APC UPS then the flow can be downloaded below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-file\"><a id=\"wp-block-file--media-bd4f4cd2-f990-45e9-b762-748a96c1be8f\" href=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/M0AWS-Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow.zip\">M0AWS-Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/M0AWS-Node-Red-APC-UPS-Flow.zip\" class=\"wp-block-file__button wp-element-button\" download aria-describedby=\"wp-block-file--media-bd4f4cd2-f990-45e9-b762-748a96c1be8f\">Download<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br>More soon &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Living in a rural area we have a very unreliable mains power supply and so I have to protect all the IT equipment in my home lab with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Over the years I&#8217;ve found APC UPSs to be super reliable and use them extensively around the house to keep important services &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/?p=4546\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Node-Red APC UPS Dashboard&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[548,545,544,180,132,189,184,4,546,38,547,179,186,135,122,487,133,344,549,215,369],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-548","category-apc","category-apcupsd","category-dashboard","category-debian","category-floweditor","category-flows","category-ham-radio","category-homelab","category-linux","category-monitoring","category-nodered","category-nodes","category-opensource","category-raspberrypi","category-raspberrypi500","category-ssh","category-tcp-ip","category-textarea","category-ubuntu","category-ups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4546"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4563,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4546\/revisions\/4563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}