Eaton PredictPulse Reviews

We use it to provide uninterrupted power to security systems, gaming systems, and surveillance systems on a gaming floor at a casino.

On our casino floor, in a power outage, hundreds of games could go down and would need to be manually brought back up. Even though we can run off generator power, we need that bridge to get us there and it's been doing it since. It has been taking care of it.

We use Eaton's remote monitoring and it's pretty comprehensive if there's any kind of issue. It's measuring and monitoring things. The remote monitoring makes my job easier and makes me more productive. With the remote monitoring, we don't have to physically look at the piece of equipment. I could be offsite. I could be anywhere and I can see how it's operating or any issues it could be having. I can do that from my phone.

Many of its features are valuable, but the ability to be notified in real-time is the most valuable aspect. I can be at home, it could be the middle of the night. We have it set up so that it sends emails to people if it engaged. If the power has gone out or something has gone wrong, we're notified immediately. There are three of us who receive those alerts, in the roles of director of facilities and facility managers.

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.

I have been using Eaton PredictPulse for about 10 months.

It's stable, absolutely. We haven't had any issues.

It's expandable. Whether we have the space to expand it is another story.

We're not maintaining it internally. If there's any maintenance or repair work to be done, that would be done by Eaton. Other than checking it and making sure it's running, we're not maintaining it internally.

We haven't had to use Eaton's helpdesk or field service so far.

If I recall correctly we had an Emerson unit previously.

We had a room we had to fit the solution in. That's how we came to the system, so it would fit in the room that we had for it. Compared to the old system we had, it has a larger footprint, but the old one did not take care of as much as the new system does. The power density is greater than what we were dealing with before.

If we would have upgraded the old system, the footprint from adding on to that old system wouldn't have fit in the space that we had available.

We had a greater comfort level with the Eaton products. In part that was because of how it fit in the space we were dealing with; we were constrained. In addition, there are no issues with hotspots. Beyond that, we also use a lot of Eaton equipment throughout our property. Keeping in line with that was definitely a positive.

The initial setup was a complex project, but the install was pretty straightforward. It was handled well. An electrician was used as part of the install and there were people from Eaton here. It was a positive experience. They were fine.

The deployment took a few days. Once they had the equipment in there it was a few days until they had it up and running.

We were converting how the power is distributed to all parts of our building. We had to take down the old UPS system and bring up the new one to supply areas of our property, in sections. We would do it overnight to lessen the impact on our guests and team members.

The cost associated with having to bring our gaming equipment up manually anytime there's a power outage, surge, or sag in the area is where we see ROI. I couldn't really put a value on that. It provides us with uninterrupted service for all our other systems.

We priced out the entire project with multiple options and the Eaton equipment was right in line with our budget. I'm not aware of any costs in addition to initial fees.

It saves us time and it saves us money. If the equipment that it protects is valuable to your business, it will keep it operating.

It was the right system to go with. We're close to a year in, and there have been zero issues. In the preceding couple of years we had so many issues with the old system; it was undersized and it wasn't really protecting everything that the current one is. It has given us that reliability. We were able to make the system larger and cover more equipment. It's hard to compare apples to apples because we weren't covering the same things, but it makes all the difference in the world, if you're going to use a product like this, to make sure it's covering all of your important, the critical items.

We're using other Eaton solutions in our environment and they're reliable. We've had power issues here and the Eaton equipment holds up. Eaton covers it all. There are things that they provide that we don't have here on our property, but what they have is pretty comprehensive.

We're using Eaton's UPS systems with PredictPulse. All our UPSs are tied in. They report to PredictPulse with daily emails or notifications. We use PredictPulse to monitor the UPS systems and conditions.

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. Eaton gets the alarm, they schedule the site visit, and they come and fix the problem.

I'm not aware of any feature other than the notifications. It provides notifications about our UPSs so that it can generate service calls automatically with Eaton. They get a monthly report.

Their field technicians are very good. For example, they're coming to replace a battery tonight. The issues that we have had with the systems have been pretty minor. We've had one bad module that they had to replace. There haven't been many issues with the product, but when there have been issues, they've been able to get onsite in a timely fashion and get them repaired. We've never had to have them come back. They've always been able to come out and make the repair without having to make a return visit.

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.

They could look at SMS messaging or multimedia messaging. I'm sure there are some other messaging-type systems available for generating less traffic than an email. Maybe they could provide a more secure messaging system. I would suggest that they look at other technology available.

There are a lot of things have to be working for it to work; not just PredictPulse but everything on the customer's end has to be functioning too. But we haven't seen any issues with PredictPulse, itself, not getting the data. The only issue that I know of has been with the email server or internet connectivity; things you would tend to expect with this type of set up.

We don't have any plans to scale this any further. It's only being used for notification and generation of automated service calls.

Eaton's technical support has been great. They're top-notch.

We did not have a previous solution. We implemented PredictPulse to provide more visibility into the systems. We have our own automation system that monitors, but that still requires us to generate a service call. Eaton PredictPulse eliminates that and automates that aspect for us.

The initial setup was straightforward. We set up an email server and PredictPulse sends emails out every few minutes with the status of UPS. The biggest thing is that you have to have an email server that can handle the number of daily emails that it's generating. We have several UPS units so there are a lot of emails, but the setup wasn't a problem. It's not complex. You just need to understand that the system will generate a lot of emails on a daily basis.

If you're not a technical guy, you're not going to understand that. You have to be an IT person to understand how to set up PredictPulse. So different customers might give a different answer than I have.

For us, the setup of PredictPulse took a few minutes. It was pretty simple. You just set up the firmware and the UPS system has an email address and then you just turn it on.

We had Eaton come in. We gave them the IP configurations that they needed, the Ethernet configurations, SMTP configurations, etc. We gave them the information and then they programmed it and set it up. Our experience with their deployment team was fine. There were no problems.

We probably haven't seen return on our investment by going with PredictPulse because we haven't had the type of failure that would give us that. PredictPulse is risk-mitigation. So until you have a need to mitigate a risk, it's hard to get an ROI. You almost need a catastrophic failure to understand the value of the service.

My advice is don't buy it just because it's there but because you have a need for it. You have to understand your own needs and then see if PredictPulse will be that solution to your needs.

The solution is doing what it needs to do. It's has provided us a service that we felt we needed. 

The visibility the service provides into our UPS equipment through the reporting is okay. There isn't much to report other than the UPS conditions. We also have dynamic monitoring of our UPS systems, so the PredictPulse report confirms what we already know. The PredictPulse reports are fine. We don't have a problem with them. That's not really the reason we got PredictPulse, but there's no problem with them.

We use an Eaton Service Plan. The only remote monitoring we have is with PredictPulse. The repairs that we have had done through our agreement have met all of the criteria of our agreement, as far as responding and service go.

The only people we have using PredictPulse are data center engineers or critical facility technicians. It's a team of about six to seven people. We don't need any people for deployment and maintenance of PredictPulse because it's a managed service by Eaton.