What Are Data Centers?
Data centers are specialized facilities designed to house computing infrastructure, including servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and associated power and cooling systems. These centers support mission-critical operations for enterprises, cloud providers, and service platforms. Ensuring reliable, continuous operation is paramount, as downtime can result in substantial financial losses and service disruptions.
What Is Data Center Metering?
Data center metering refers to the process of measuring, monitoring, and analyzing electrical consumption and power quality at various points within a data center. It enables facility managers, operators, and energy teams to:
- Understand real-time energy consumption patterns.
- Monitor the health and performance of power distribution systems.
- Detect anomalies, inefficiencies, or potential faults.
- Support billing, capacity planning, and sustainability initiatives.
Metering is a critical component of a comprehensive data center infrastructure management (DCIM) strategy, providing actionable insights that improve efficiency and reduce operational costs.
Why Data Center Metering Is Needed
The reasons for implementing metering in a data center are multi-fold:
Energy Efficiency & Cost Control: Data centers are among the largest energy consumers in commercial infrastructure. Accurate metering enables operators to track consumption at granular levels and implement energy-saving measures.
Power Reliability & Quality Monitoring: Metering allows for early detection of voltage fluctuations, harmonics, and other power quality issues that could impact sensitive IT equipment.
Capacity Planning: Understanding load distribution helps prevent overloads, optimize redundancy, and plan expansions efficiently.
Compliance & Reporting: Detailed energy consumption data supports regulatory reporting and sustainability initiatives, including carbon footprint tracking.
Operational Visibility: Enables real-time dashboards, alerts, and predictive analytics, ensuring proactive management of both power and IT loads.
Types of Electrical Meters in Data Centers
Permanent metering devices in data centers are designed to provide long-term monitoring of energy consumption and power quality, supporting trend analysis and operational control. Common types include:
Power Quality Meters
- Monitor voltage sags/swells, harmonics, transients, frequency, and other power quality parameters, along with active/reactive power, current, voltage, and power factor.
- High-accuracy, high-sampling devices suitable for engineering-grade analysis.
- Compliant with standards such as IEC 61000‑4‑30 and IEC 62053‑22.
- Measure total energy consumption, active, reactive, and apparent power.
- Serve as the foundation for energy tracking, cost allocation, and operational analytics.
Digital Relay Embedded Meters
- Integrated into protection relays, providing both metering and fault detection/event logging capabilities.
- Allow rapid capture of anomalies while providing measurement data.
Electronic Trip Unit Embedded Meters
- Embedded in circuit breakers with electronic trip units.
- Combine protection and metering functions, reducing additional equipment needs.
UPS Embedded Meters
- Integrated into UPS systems to measure output power, energy, and power quality.
- Track UPS efficiency, load distribution, and redundancy performance.
PDU / Busway Embedded Meters
- Installed in Power Distribution Units or busways to monitor branch circuits.
- Provide rack-level or distribution panel-level visibility.
Rack PDU Embedded Meters
- Installed at the rack level to monitor each output or device.
- Enable granular monitoring for per-server energy tracking, load balancing, and thermal management.
Additionally, current transformers (CTs) and potential transformers (PTs) are commonly used to scale high currents/voltages for measurement. Split-core CTs are particularly useful for retrofit installations in operating facilities.
Data Center Metering Solutions for your projects
Our metering solutions enable facility managers to accurately assess system capacity, mitigate load imbalance risks, and prevent line overload by providing real-time current and power data accurate to the feeder level. For this purpose, we recommend high-density multi-loop monitoring meters, which integrate hundreds of measurement points and simplify BMS integration, ensuring high system availability.
If you need to improve your data center’s energy efficiency (PUE) and DC system health, our metering solutions help engineers accurately calculate and optimize PUE through granular metering at key points such as UPS outputs, cooling systems, and 48V DC buses. Furthermore, for new DC architectures, we recommend high-precision DC meters to monitor the health of DC feeders and battery systems, facilitating rapid fault diagnosis and achieving maximum energy efficiency.
If you need to accurately allocate energy costs to customers or internal departments, our solutions achieve revenue-grade energy allocation through rack-level or PDU-level metering deployment. This allows managed service providers to deliver transparent, undisputed customer electricity bills, ensuring accurate cost recovery. We recommend using certified smart PDU meters or dedicated multi-loop meters to ensure the integrity of billing data and legal compliance.
Conclusion
Data center metering provides precise visibility into energy use and power quality, enabling real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and operational efficiency. Scalable, modular, and standards-compliant, it reduces costs, improves reliability, and supports sustainability—making it essential for modern data center operations.
