Sustainable IT dashboard

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 7 minutes to read
  • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Sustainable IT Dashboard

    The Sustainable IT dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the sustainability impact of an organization's IT assets, including hardware, data centers, and overall IT footprint. It features a global map that shows the carbon footprint and energy efficiency of facilities, enabling organizations to assess their sustainability performance effectively.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • IT Footprint Map: Displays carbon emissions and energy efficiency of datacenters and office buildings, allowing users to hover over icons for detailed metrics like PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and CO2e emissions.
    • Hardware Assets Tab: Features trend charts for carbon emissions and energy consumption, with the ability to filter and drill down into detailed energy data based on model categories and locations.
    • Data Center Tab: Showcases overall energy and emissions data, including metrics for energy usage (kWh) and efficiency (PUE, WUE, CUE), enabling comparison across data centers.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing the Sustainable IT dashboard, organizations can:

    • Visualize and compare energy consumption and emissions across various IT assets.
    • Identify energy-efficient facilities and areas for improvement in sustainability practices.
    • Access detailed insights into hardware performance and sustainability, facilitating informed decision-making.

    To fully utilize the dashboard, ensure the activation of the necessary plugins for hardware asset management and geo mapping.

    The Sustainable IT dashboard displays a variety of information to easily gauge the sustainability impact of the IT assets of an organization.

    The Sustainable IT dashboard displays data for Hardware assets, datacenters, and your organization's IT footprint on the world map. Datacenters refer to the facilities that house the IT infrastructure. All these tabs are explained in the following sections.
    Note:
    To view the Hardware assets tab and the Data centers tab on the dashboard, you must activate the Hardware Asset Management (sn_hamp) plugin. Additionally, to activate the IT footprint map tab, you must activate the Geo Map component (sn_geo_map) plugin. For more information on the required Geo Map component, see the Understanding Google Maps APIs in geo-map component [KB1588661] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.

    IT footprint map

    The first tab on the Sustainable IT dashboard showcases a global map depicting the carbon footprint of your datacenters, office buildings, and so on, highlighting your most energy-efficient facilities. The data displayed is determined by the configuration that you configure on the map marker. For more information, refer to Configure a map marker. When you point to the icons on the map, you can view the classification of the configured marker's efficiency, the metric name, the entity name, and the most recent metric data available. You can configure any of the metric definitions that are provided along with the Sustainable IT plugin. Only those metric definitions that are grouped under Sustainable IT are available for selection. For example, you can use the following the metric definitions:
    • Carbon intensity for office locations
    • DCiE by data center
      Note:
      DCiE stands for datacenter infrastructure efficiency.

    For more information on how you can filter the metric definitions that are grouped under Sustainable IT, refer to Filter Sustainable IT metric definitions.

    When you move the cursor over the icon, a popover is displayed. On the popover, you can select the entity name and a side panel opens that shows the metrics related to the selected entity of following metric definitions.
    • PUE by Data Center
    • WUE by Data Center
    • CUE by Data Center
    • CO2e emissions from energy usage
    • Total energy used
    • Hardware energy consumption by location
    • CO2e from hardware assets by location

    You can select Open link to navigate to the metric record page for details. An entity class filter on the right side of the dashboard is available to select the data that you want to view.

    Hardware assets

    The following video shows the Hardware assets tab.

    Overview: In the overview section, you can see the Trend chart that displays the data for the following metric definitions:
    • Carbon emissions from hardware assets.
    • Hardware energy consumption.
    You can click on the chart to further explore or delve into more detailed information or data related to the chart. The fields from where the data is obtained are specified in the metric definition form. For more information, see Create an automated metric definition.
    Energy consumption: The energy consumption section displays the information in the subsequent formats:
    • Total energy consumption (kWh): This figure represents the total energy consumption for the Hardware energy consumption by model category metric definition. Hardware energy consumption by model category refers to the amount of energy or power consumed by different categories of hardware. Hardware model category refers to various types of devices, such as computers, servers, or other devices. The configuration of the metric definition includes specifying the model category column in the hardware table for the purpose of data collection.
    • Energy consumption by model category (kWh) or location: This horizontal bar graph displays the energy consumption data. You can filter the data either by the Location filter or the Model category filter. You have the option to sort the bar chart in either ascending or descending order using the available filters. If you drill down on this bar chart, a new page opens that displays further details about the assets that are in use and that consume maximum energy. By default, this new page shows all the assets of the first bar in the chart at the bottom and shows the top models by energy consumption on the right.
    • Energy star assets: The dial chart showcases the number of energy star certified assets out of the total number of assets.
    Emissions: Within the emissions section, the data is presented in the following format.
    • Total emission (days): You can view both the total emissions value and the variation in emissions when compared to the previous month.
    • Emissions by model category or by location (days): This horizontal bar graph displays the emissions data. You can filter the data either by the Location filter or the Model category filter. You have the option to sort the bar chart in either ascending or descending order using the available filters. If you drill down on this bar chart, a new page opens that displays further details about the assets that are in use and that generate maximum emissions. By default, this new page shows all the assets of the first bar in the chart at the bottom and shows the top models by emissions on the right. The data that is displayed depends on the selection you make in the filters, that is, whether you selected Location or Model category.
    E-waste reused, donated, or landfilled: In this section, the data is presented in the following format:
    • Retired assets (lbs): The donut chart displays the number of assets reused, donated, and disposed.
    • Landfills (lbs): The pie chart in this section displays the weight of hardware assets, by model categories, that have been disposed. This weight is in pounds.
    The data for this section is obtained from the Hardware asset table. Each chart is interactive, enabling you to click on specific segments to access more detailed information.

    Data centers

    The following figure shows the Data center tab.The data centers tab of the Sustainable IT dashboard.

    Overview: In the overview section, you can view the Trend chart that displays the data for the following metric definitions:
    • Co2e from energy usage
    • Total energy used
    You can click on the chart to further explore or delve into more detailed information about the energy use or emission for each data center. The overview section also displays the number of data centers from where the data for emissions and energy is sourced. You can also see top three greenest data centers based on the DCiE where the data center with the highest DCiE is ranked at the top. Greenest data centers refer to data centers have the minimum amount of emissions.
    Data center efficiency: In the data center efficiency section, the data is presented in the following formats:
    • Power usage effectiveness: Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to assess the energy efficiency of a data center. It is a ratio that quantifies the amount of energy consumed by a data center facility compared to the energy used by the IT equipment it houses.
    • Water usage effectiveness (KgCO2e): Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is a metric used to evaluate the water efficiency of a data center or a facility. Similar to Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which measures energy efficiency, WUE quantifies the amount of water consumed by a data center facility in relation to the water used by the IT equipment.
    • Carbon usage effectiveness (KgCO2e/kWh): Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) is a metric used to assess the carbon efficiency and environmental impact of a data center or facility. It quantifies the amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced per unit of IT load or computing work performed by the data center.
    Energy consumption: Within the energy consumption section, the information is displayed in the subsequent formats:
    • Total energy consumption (kWh): This figure represents the combined energy consumption of all the data centers. It provides an overview of the overall energy usage across all the data centers.
    • Total energy consumption by source: A donut chart is used to illustrate the distribution of energy consumption in kilowatt hours (kWh) from different energy sources. The energy sources are specified in the form of metric definitions. Each section of the semi donut chart is interactive, allowing you to click on specific segments to access more detailed information.
    • Energy consumption by data centers (kWh): The bar chart showcases the energy consumption for each individual data center, considering all the active metric definitions. You have the option to sort the bar chart in either ascending or descending order using the available filters. This allows you to analyze and compare the energy usage of different data centers more effectively.
    Emissions: In the emissions section, the data is presented in the following formats:
    • Total emissions (KgCO2e): This figure represents the total emissions for all the data centers.
    • Emissions by data center (KgCO2e): The bar chart showcases the emissions for each individual data center, considering all the active metric definitions. You can use the provided filters to sort the bar chart in either ascending or descending order. Additionally, each bar of the bar chart is interactive, allowing you to click on specific segments to access more detailed information.
    Note:
    The data is aggregated by using the summation method.