Create a custom Universal Device Poller in SolarWinds, and assign to the PDUs

Portions of this description are very specific to our configuration.  Please expect that you may need to adjust the process if you have different equipment.  The following process is known to work for the following APC models: AP7811, AP7841, and AP7830.

We have three models of PDU at our datacenter, and they operate with slight differences.  The key difference is that our 30 AMP units have two banks (kind of like circuits within the PDU) and the 20 AMP units only have a single bank.  This is important from a monitoring standpoint because the multiple banked units report AMP loads back with a three row table, while the single units return one row.  Additionally, our PDU reported back in 10ths of AMPs (ex: a 7.7 AMP load was reported as 77).  In order to show the load in AMPs, we also had to create a "Transform Results" to do the conversion.  

To get things started, I created a "New Universal Device Poller" called PDU_AMP_load.

When creating the new poller, I found it very useful / essential to use the "Browse MIB Tree" button within the wizard.  Two key parts of this process are to 1) find an OID that will work (trial & error in my case) for a specific device, and then 2) test the OID against the other PDUs.  These steps helped me realize that I was going to sometimes be dealing with multiple rows, and it also first showed that the data was in tenths of AMPs.  Overall, I spent a good chunk of time with "Browse MIB Tree"; and it ended up being time well spent.

As I mentioned above, we didn't want to see the load displayed in tenths of Amps.  To handle this, we used "Transform Results" to define how we wanted to handle the data that was returned.  There were a few iterations of this.  Don't be initially concerned with the entire formula, I'll detail that later.  To display the load in Amps, {PDU_AMP_load}/10 did the trick.

Along the way, we realized that we were only getting whole numbers (ex: 7 AMPS vs 7.7).  To address this, we added the Function Truncate with a ,1 to designate the number of decimals to display.

Finally, there was the nagging issue of multiple rows of data for the banked systems.  One of the rows ended up being a sum, but just to complicate things, it wasn't always the same row on all models.  What we ended up doing was adding ColumnMax to the formula so that all the row values would return the highest value.  Again, testing against your hardware is an essential part of the process.