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Green IT - Configuration Guide

Summary

Environmental awareness is on the rise throughout society, and companies are coming under increasing pressure to consider their activities' environmental impact and reduce this wherever possible. A key component for most companies is the concept of Green IT. While processes may have been put in place to improve elements such as purchasing management or the reduction of printing; companies do not necessarily have a clear view of their Green IT maturity through factual measures. Using Nexthink technologies, this pack will allow you to measure your Windows laptops' energy consumption, see your Mac devices' energy settings, and visualize the areas of high energy consumption in your data center and storage infrastructure.

This pack will identify key settings or behaviors that can significantly affect the overall energy consumption of a department or company. These include identifying devices that are either set up with an energy-intensive power plan, running excessively, or even continuously. These three behaviors are grouped into an overall “improvement” score as they can be easily addressed. Using Nexthink Engage, a Green IT “quiz” will help you gauge the environmental awareness of your employees, and to help you reduce your overall emissions, targeted educational reminders can be sent to those employees exhibiting specific behaviors, such as never turning off a laptop.

Categories

There are two categories included in this pack.

Green IT Devices

This category contains two keywords; “Green Label” and “Whitelisted Devices.” The “Green Label” keyword should be populated with all particularly energy-efficient device models. One metric in the device optimization folder will identify all devices, not in this category allowing you to identify devices that could be replaced as a priority. The “Whitelisted Devices” keyword should contain any devices that should be exempt from the metrics included in this pack because they are designed to run continuously for business reasons. This could include, for example, IT monitoring PCs. The “Devices over three years old” keyword should contain a list of devices you know to have been purchased over three years ago. These devices will then be used in the corresponding score calculation “Devices >3 Yrs old and DEX >7”. This keyword can be populated via an export from your CMDB or another asset repository.

Green IT Servers

This category contains one keyword for “Internal Servers.” This should be configured with the IP address ranges of your server farm to enable server-based metrics to function correctly.

Score

This pack includes a score file. This may need to be modified according to your organizational requirements.

There are four elements to the score file. The first is a standalone calculation for machines over three years old with a DEX Device score of more than 7. The idea is that devices that may ordinarily be ready for replacement can be retained if they are still functioning well. If your hardware replacement policy is more than three years or has a lower DEX threshold of usefulness, you can modify this score component.

Note: Devices over three years old are determined in two ways. The first is via the “First_Seen” property in Nexthink and refers to the first time the Nexthink Collector reported the device's activity. For new or upgraded customers, this historical information may not be available to a category keyword created where a list of devices over three years old can be imported.

The three remaining elements are leaf scores for an overall composite score for “Best practices improvement.” The leaf scores are:

  • Devices always running - this measures device uptime, with a low score from 5 to 7 days of continuous running.

  • Devices running excessively also measure device runtime with a low score of over 47.5 hours runtime.

  • Bad Power Plan - this measures the output from the “Get Battery Status” Remote Action. A low score is recorded for any incidence of the “High Performance” power plan.

The score composite is configured to calculate the average value of the available leaf scores. The associated metrics are configured to only display score results lower than 5.

Campaigns

There are three campaigns included in this pack:

  • Green IT Quiz

  • Power Plan Education

  • Shut Down Education

The Quiz is a set of three questions to help gauge your employees' knowledge of green issues. The detailed responses to the questions are designed to be informative, and links to the source material for each fact are included.

At the end of the quiz, an optional request for employees to join a green pilot plan is included. This should either be monitored for positive responses or removed if it is not required.

The other two campaigns are designed to be sent to targeted employees who may need education on green issues. The Power Plan Education campaign is set up with an Investigation. It will be sent to all employees whose device is running a High-Performance power profile (according to the Green IT score - see above). The Shut Down Education campaign is set up with an Investigation and will be sent to all employees whose device is running excessively or all the time (according to the Green IT score - see above).

Investigations

There are four investigations included in this pack:

  • Green IT - Employees with devices with a bad power plan

  • Green IT - Employees with devices running excessively

  • Green IT - Windows Remote Action

  • Green IT - macOS Remote Action

The first two Investigations are integrated into the “Power Plan Education” and “Shut Down Education” campaigns, respectively. They should not require any modification as they are based on the score file included in this pack.

The remote action Investigations are designed to launch either the “Get-Consumption Info” remote action for Windows or the “Get Power Plan” remote action for macOS, respectively. These should be edited and modified according to your organizational requirements.

Remote Actions

There are seven remote actions included in this pack:

  • Get Battery Status

    • Note: This Remote Action is for both macOS and Windows.

  • Get MS Office Information

    • Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.

  • Get OneDrive Information

    • Note: This Remote Action is for both macOS and Windows.

  • Get Power Plan

    • Note: This Remote Action is for macOS only.

  • Get User Folder Size

    • Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.

  • Get Consumption Information

    • Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.

  • Set Power Plan

    • Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.

There are only two remote actions that require any parameters.

Get User Folder Size will measure the whole user profile by default. Using the parameter, it is possible to restrict the size calculation to the \Documents folder, for example.

Get Consumption Information can be run against all Windows devices containing a battery, typically laptops.

The power consumption of the following elements is estimated using Microsofts powercfg.exe tool:

  • CPU

  • Disk

  • Display

  • Network

The energy consumption is displayed in Watt-hours (Wh) instead of kilowatts due to the potentially small energy consumption measures involved. There is only one parameter for this remote action, the ratio of Watt-hours per Kg CO2. A generic value for Western Europe (0.3) is pre-configured and displayed on the dashboard. If you wish to use this ratio more, please be aware that it can vary dramatically from region to region depending on how power is generated there. You can find regional data for CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour in grams from ourworldindata.org. After finding the CO2 emissions for your country, simply convert the values in grams to kilograms and plug that value into the “Get Consumption Information” remote action. Unfortunately, some of the data may not be up-to-date so double-check with other reputable sources in your country if possible.

Note: Unfortunately, the only way to get a true regional split regarding greenhouse gas emissions would be to duplicate the remote action for each discrete region.

IMPORTANT: Due to how the Remote Action calculates its data, the Get Consumption Information Remote Action should be run hourly on devices. This enables the Remote Action to pick up the power used over the day, even for systems that are on for less than a full day.

Dashboards

Device Optimization

This dashboard is concerned with device configurations that can directly or indirectly affect an organization's energy consumption.

For the metrics in this dashboard to function correctly, it may be necessary to modify the score, the categories, or the remote actions in this pack. Please refer to the relevant sections for more information.

Device Consumption

This dashboard shows the results of the “Get-Consumption Info” remote action that can be run against all windows devices containing a battery, typically laptops.

The power consumption of the following elements is measured:

  • CPU

  • Disk

  • Display

  • Network

The energy consumption is displayed in Watt-hours (Wh) instead of kilowatts due to the potentially small energy consumption measures involved.

Infrastructure

This dashboard is concerned with the energy consumed by your IT infrastructure, namely:

  • Servers that can be decommissioned from your data center

  • Outlook storage files

  • OneDrive storage folders

Three remote actions are used in this dashboard. They do not have any parameters but should be run regularly to keep the dashboard up-to-date. The remote actions are:

  • Get User Folder Size

  • Get OneDrive Status

  • Get MS Office information

Employee Awareness

This dashboard displays the results of the campaign “quiz” included in this pack. The responses to the questions are shown, together with the overall responsiveness ratio. Below, the average energy consumption of campaign respondents is displayed to see if there is any difference in behavior between employees who are or are not aware of green issues.

Change Log

V1.0.0.0 - Initial Release

Last updated

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