Eaton PredictPulse vs Vertiv Environet Alert comparison

"PredictPulse tells me stuff like, "Hey, this room's too hot," that's going to kill my UPS. That's going to shut this thing down. It might prevent a power outage. Right there, that one's not quite as critical, but you're talking, if they go down, tens of thousands at a minimum of loss. So, it pays for itself by having the ability to know without having to walk out there all the time and look at it, because people will get busy, then they won't do their rounds and stuff getting missed. With PredictPulse, it doesn't get missed."

"The most valuable feature is the instant notification, remotely via email, of any change in the status of the UPS, which is important. The UPS's provide critical control functions, such as emergency lighting and operation of emergency communications for passengers, and operation of critical radio systems which are needed for communication between Metro and the local Sheriff department."

"Event Viewer saves me a lot of time when getting everything ready for our fire insurance rating inspection, once every seven to eight years."

"PredictPulse saved us time by helping to avoid downtime and other problems. It would take 20 minutes to an hour to try to figure out the problem, whereas we immediately knew where the problem was with the help of PredictPulse. It easily saves us hundreds of man-hours just for that downtime. For production, we did have production lost and that could be in the thousands to possibly millions of dollars."

"It gives us the opportunity to know if we have an issue with a UPS and then it invokes the automated service ticketing system. So we don't really have to do anything."

"I use the feature which alerts me to power outages, whether it is going on and off the battery. E.g., this feature came in handy last weekend when the Department of Water and Power took the power down. They said that it was for 12 hours, but it ended up being 14 hours. I could manage the readings on the batteries, ensure they weren't draining, and everything was okay. They made it through the whole outage."

"You can also program a report at the frequency you choose — I chose a monthly frequency — and get a report from each unit describing the average performance throughout that time period. That's very critical because we can use that as a maintenance tool to monitor the health of the unit."

"The most valuable feature is being able to run reports on it. We get a monthly report on outages and usage and we can see how often we've had downtime, if we've had downtime."

"Environet Alert's best features are strong technology, good storage in supplies, and after-service."

"It's been working very well. The only issue I've ever had with it was when we did the initial setup. We had issues getting it to bypass through the firewall. Their support staff were very helpful and we were able to get that taken care of pretty quickly, within a day or two."

"I don't have problems with Eaton products, except that they're proprietary."

"They have redone the monthly report to make them easier to read through."

"I don't know if the way they do the emails, daily, is the best way. It seems like they could come up with a better solution for communication. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it just seems like it's a little outdated... Maybe they could provide a more secure messaging system."

"We did have an issue getting it initially connected from our system through their particular email address. It was hard because we have a security parameter. It took two or three technicians to figure out that we had to remove the monitoring in our email addresses due to firewalls. We were blocking them and they were blocking us because the message would not always translate after it was encrypted leaving from us. We had to do a bit of work in our security email system to make our UPS system and PredictPulse part talk to their collection agent. I don't know why it happened. At one point, we could see them but they weren't picking up the pulses that were required to send back to us. This took work to resolve and could be streamlined."

"I like visibility the service provides into our UPS equipment through its reporting, but it could be better. I would like it to be easier to set up for the specific things I'd like to monitor and how we would like to get notified. E.g., I would like to have battery run-time be more of an alert because I don't really care when the unit goes on battery, as long as it goes on battery. However, something I would care about is if the battery was down below 10 percent. That would be something which would be good to get notified on. It would also be good to have past data to be able to drill into if something had happened a week ago to do failure analysis on."

"The only thing I can think of is the remote monitoring. When it's communicating something, if there's an event or there's an issue, the dashboard and how it's presented could be improved. I know what it's communicating, but if we had someone at a different level monitoring it, they might not understand if it's a critical item. The remote monitoring dashboard could be simplified."

"Right now, the problem with our emails is we do not have a way to separate emails to Eaton versus us. So, we get a lot of alerts that we might not get, which are almost considered spam. It would be nice if we could segregate them: This group of people gets these emails and this other group of people gets these emails. As of now, it's a shotgun approach where we get so many. It's like, "Oh God, another one," as opposed to being able to filter out exactly what we do want, since we don't want to miss any."

"Environet Alert could be cheaper and more widely available."

"It's part of our service contracts, so it's not broken down as a separate line item."

"It is saving our organization around $10,000 a month."

"In order to give us the latest, greatest version of PredictPulse, Eaton had to give us new cards on our UPS systems. Eaton provided the cards and had our technician install them at no cost to us."

"Eaton was only one who offered to let us try it out for free. Right now, we are not paying anything for it, so the return on investment is great."

"We have bought all of the features of PredictPulse because each of them serves a different purpose for us."

"We pay $4,000 for the Eaton 93PM UPS, which includes PredictPulse. It is a reasonable price."

"Environet Alert is a little expensive."