I’ve got a question about power tracking data collection. We’re close to rolling out a BigFix managed power plan in my environment, but first upper management wants me to put together a data management plan. I need to say what kind of power tracking data is collected and how long it is stored for.
I see the setting TrackingWindowDays in the Configure Power Tracking Default Settings task is configurable from 1-90 days, but I’m not sure how to reconcile that setting with the Power Consumption Summary dashboard being able to display the last week, month, or year of data.
Does the dashboard pull from some other pared down store of data? Or is it only showing the information from however many days you’ve specified in TrackingWindowDays?
There is an amount of data stored on the client, then there is an amount aggregated by the server and those aren’t necessarily the same I think.
I think the client will store some rather specific data but for a much shorter time. The aggregated data is not very specific, but can be stored for much longer because it is much less detailed.
What is the goal? to get a good picture of the power usage and try to reduce it? Or just measure it? or just reduce it?
There is a lot you can do to reduce the power usage without ever tracking it.
Oh interesting, so it seems like the dashboard reports on the data aggregated by the server. That’s good to know. If you or anyone else has any more detail on that process, that’d be super helpful.
The goal here is to reduce power usage by putting PCs into standby when idle for 30 minutes or more. I’ve got everything configured, it’s just that upper management wants to make sure we’re covered against things like a particular person asking for data on how much work their subordinates do in a given day, or how we might respond to a subpoena if law enforcement wanted usage data on a computer 6 months ago or whatever.
This could be possible using the data the client collects and keeps, but it is only available for the past X days, which is configurable. This data is not available on the client past those X days. It also isn’t very easy to use this data since it can be rather granular, plus the fact that a lot of the work day is doing productive work not in front of the computer. Trying to use this data with any certainty of how much a particular user is using a particular machine would be very difficult and require a lot of manual work and even then you would need to look to other sources of data to validate it that would be more accurate anyway. A lot of the same info can be had from active directory logins or network traffic from the system or the existing windows logs which track logins and other events. If an enterprise is very determined to go the Big Brother route on a user and use all possible methods of data collection together then the data is already available and is nearly impossible to avoid.
I don’t think the server keeps the granular data that the client collects, only aggregate data, so it would not be very useful for telling how much a computer is used on a particular day in the past, only how much it appears to be used in aggregate over a period of time. I don’t know the full details of how this data is kept.
Got it – thanks. That’s pretty much the argument I’ve been trying to make – it’s way too onerous to 1) get this data and 2) use this data to try to prove anything that couldn’t be proven more easily another way. I’ll mark this as solved, but if anyone else has any insight into the type of data the server stores and how it does so, I’d be interested to hear it.